The Orpheus Variations
Creative Direction and Video & Projection Design for Live Cinema
The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s The Orpheus Variations is a live cinema experience inspired by the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Underworld and contemporary theories on the neuroscience of memory. The experience collides cinema, theatre, and radio play performance vocabularies into an art house film both constructed and experienced in real time, and invites the audience’s gaze to wander from construction to construct and back again in an attempt to make peace between the truth of reality and the cinematic glaze of a memory.
The production was the first in The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s celebrated live cinema series, and was subsequently presented at HERE Arts Center, The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, and the Theatre at the 14th Street Y in New York City.
Production History
Magic Futurebox | New York, NY | 2013
HERE | New York, NY | 2014
The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival | New York, NY | 2015
Theater at the 14th Street Y | New York, NY | 2015
Creative Team
Conceived, Written, and Directed by Adam J. Thompson
Created Collaboratively by The Deconstructive Theatre Project
Production Design: Katie Fleming
Sound Design: Andy Sowers
Costume Design: Sydney Gallas
Video and Projection Design: Philip Gulley and Adam J. Thompson
Photos: Mitch Dean
Press
“The Orpheus Variations is one of the most intoxicating performance experiences in recent memory….Thompson gives his audience choice by allowing us to focus on the various elements at play. While one may instinctively pay closer attention to the film being projected, there are guaranteed to be moments when the eye wanders to the ensemble setting up for the next scene (a fascinating process), or the principal lovers interacting when they are off-screen (a particularly beautiful throughline). In an age where theatre is constantly trying to reinvent itself and distinguish itself from film, [T]he Deconstructive Theatre Project takes the opposite approach and creates a hybrid experience that never sacrifices the magic of the movies, the rush of live theatre, or the cathartic experience of clear and simple storytelling.” - Theatre Is Easy
“What I find most exciting about The Orpheus Variations…is that it is quite literally impossible for any two audience members to experience the piece in the same way. By design, each performance contains an infinite number of possible journeys – from film to construction of film to individual actors and back again – creating an intentionally subjective, wholly viewer-dependent theater-going experience. By simultaneously deconstructing both the mind’s interpretation of reality and the theater-making process, The Orpheus Variations has masterfully reinvented what live theater can mean for the individual, while illuminating the utter complexity + subjectivity of our own consciousness.” - ArtLab
“It’s so exciting to see a production whose mission is so purposeful and whose work is not only unique, but also innovatively reflective on the future of the performing arts.” - Letters from the Mezzanine
“Adam J. Thompson [has] created a myth of Orpheus which is unlike any that preceded it and provide[s] the audience with an array of variations satisfying to every critical ear…The spirit of Virginia Woolf consumes the theatre as the [c]ompany creates a room of Orpheus’ own illuminated by his stream of consciousness recollection of his past. Resist as it might, the audience falls prey to the temporary dissolution of its ego strength and swims freely in the surreal seams of the Id where it finds unexpected surcease and comfort. Orpheus and the audience experience catharsis, redemption, and release and emerge ready to re-enter life’s stage.” - Theatre Reviews Limited