By Joan Didion
Created by Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Here’s one: you arrive at a house party. A band is playing, some people are making out. You drink, you mingle, you dance. Lars Jan’s (ABACUS, 2014 Next Wave) multilayered vision of Joan Didion’s essay juxtaposes the author’s searing text—performed in its entirety by Obie Award-winning actor Mia Barron—with a glassed-in microcosm of social unraveling. A chorus of performers are joined onstage by members of a second audience, bearing witness to the harrowing beats of isolation, excess, and looming violence that typified Didion’s late-60s California—from the Manson murders to student protests to the Black Panthers—and finding fresh resonance in a story we tell ourselves over and over again.
Architectural design by P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S Architecture
Lighting by Andrew Schneider & Chu-hsuan Chang
Music and sound design by Jonathan Snipes
Choreography by Stephanie Zaletel
Dramaturgy by David Bruin
Produced with Miranda Wright and Los Angeles Performance Practice.
The White Album was commissioned by Center Theatre Group with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, by BAM for the 2018 Next Wave Festival, by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, and by The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. The White Album received generous development support from CalArts Center for New Performance, the Shiva Foundation, the Mark E. Pollack Foundation, and the UCross Foundation.
With special thanks to Joan Didion, Griffin Dunne, and ICM Partners.
Director, visual artist, and writer Lars Jan leads participants through creating their own visual and performative harmonies using a section from Joan Didion’s seminal essay The White Album.
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