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THROUGH THE LEAVES
by Franz Xafer Kroetz
Directed by Brittney Brady
Behind the door of a small butcher shop, Through the Leaves scrutinizes the deep inner lives of Martha and Otto. Martha is an independent woman, a butcher, and a small-business owner. Fueled by a sexual attraction that borders on violence, Otto and Martha are locked in a battle balancing independence and partnership. Raw, ruthless, and reaching for beauty, Through the Leaves is an unflinching interrogation of brutality and loneliness.
From my notebook, November 2018:
Through the Leaves is a fable of brutality and loneliness.
At the beginning of Roger Downey’s translation of our play, he includes a Bavarian proverb: Wer durchs Laub geht, muss das Rauschen dulden. We are compelled to translate it this way: He who walks through the leaves, must bear the rustling. It also reminds us of another German proverb that resonates with the play: Wo gehobelt wird, fallen Spähne or where there’s wood planing, wood shavings will fall.. But back to walking through the leaves, it makes us think about pathways and what lies to the side of them. It asks us to consider what it means to go the road alone.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about loneliness and especially what Hannah Arendt said about it: “what prepares men for totalitarian domination is loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions, like old age, has become an every day experience of the ever growing masses of our century.”
And then there is our play—siting square in front of us—this wild and simple and uncomfortable thing that stares at us, demanding we stare back.
Featuring
Juliana Alvarez and Samuel Garnett
Creative & Production Team
Production Stage Manager: Ethan Hollander
Production Manager: Ni Li
Technical Director: Mitchell Leitschuh
Scenic Designer: Songyi Park
Costume Designer: Edurne Fernandez
Lighting Designer: Christine Ferriter
Sound Designer: Bo Li
Scenic Artist: Rashi Jain
Composer: Evan Johnson
Video Designer: Christopher Jungwoo Kim
Director of Photography: Siru Wen
Fight Director: Steve Rankin
Asst. Lighting Designers: Christian Mejia & Euisun Yoon
Asst. Sound Designer: Jacenta Yu
Asst. Costume Designer: Selena Jin
Asst. Video Designer: Kathleen Fox
Assistant Technical Director: Francisco De Leon
Assistant Scenic Artists: Andrew Carey & Kato Lawton
Production Associate: Patrick Smith
Assistant Stage Manager: Gina De Luca
Assistant Production Manager: Jin Li
Assistant Scenic Designer: Tzu Hsiang
General Manager: Rui Xu
Marketing Manager: Sophie Blumberg
Digital Communications Manager: Jared Pixler
Line Producers: Xiaoyue Zhang, Alyse James
Resident Dramaturg: Changting Lu
about
Brittney Brady is a theatre artist from the humid Gulf Coast of Florida. In 2012, she co-founded Ghostbird Theatre Company, an ensemble of artists who are dedicated to producing new and site inspired performances. Some works she directed in her tenure as Producing Artistic Director for Ghostbird are Mud, Endgame, Miss Julie, The Bald Soprano, and Anne Carson’s Antigonick. Original works include The Chicken Play by Hanny Zuniga and James Brock and her own adaptation of Maxence Fermine’s novella Snow. Since moving to the desert of California, she has directed Through the Leaves by Franz Xaver Kroetz and Shakespeare’s King Lear presented at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre. Most recently she collaborated with Xiaoyue Zhang on Zhang's video/performance Little Red Book or Plural Body presented at the REDCAT NOW festival. Her theatre engages the body, in space and gesture, as a channel for deep energies. She is committed to seeing the theatre as a site of unearthing, where performer and audience, together, can seek deeper spiritual woods. She received her MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts.
