Mahinerator

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DESCRIPTION
Mahinerator is an experimental language monologue play about a bureaucrat who designs systems of mass ecocide, starring two-time OBIE award winner Steve Mellor.

Hrak! Tunely froth thine earliparts what for bespeaks Yours Trustly! He belone didst crackitate logisticals what puzzled onwards up! He belone didst solue up efficiences mahinerated cleanly dawn! Him! Him! Now listens him for sprecht the records straighten.

PRODUCTION HISTORY
The Tank, NYC - October 2023

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Williams College, Williamstown, MA - Workshop Presentation, March 2022
The Brick, NYC - Excerpt Presentation, November 2021
Featuring: Steve Mellor

PRESS

“Highbrow Brilliant”
-New York Magazine

“In a dark room, an unnamed technocrat (Steve Mellor) sits at a microphone and grumbles his life story into something called a time encapsulator: How dare others get credit for his ecocidal inventions? And why won’t his co-workers—especially the ones he hasn’t personally maimed—support him? The gravel-voiced Mellor, super dry and super droll, is an Olympic-level outraged bristler, and “Mahinerator,” Jerry Lieblich’s hilariously gruesome sci-fi monologue, fits him like a hair shirt. Lieblich composes in a discombobulating argot, equal parts religious rhapsody (he invokes “the salami of injustice”) and neologisms (e.g., “broomlicloset”) recalling “A Clockwork Orange.” The resulting brew, co-directed by Lieblich and Meghan Finn, is revolting yet thrilling—it uses language alone to melt your brain.”
-Helen Shaw, The New Yorker

“…But then, sometimes, you get a writer with Jerry Lieblich’s jangling, jaunty flair for hyper-structured grotesquerie, and an actor with Steve Mellor’s combination of lingual agility and unblinking, steam-from-nostrils commitment to the bloody viscera beneath the words, words, words…Lieblich’s verbally virtuosic play is an eerily funny, deeply chilling demonstration not simply of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity.”
-Sara Holdren, Vulture

"I've long admired Jerry's rare lucidity, the way their delving, roving intelligence is so closely attuned to language. I think their eloquence comes in part from this mingling of curiosity and care—their attentiveness to the way that words work, and the way that the production of meaning can so easily be coopted by forces of oppression, fascism, and control."
-Kate Kremer, Culturebot