The Barbarians is coming to LaMama! Performances run February 14 - March 2.
Well here's the big news I've been teasing all this time. I'm thrilled to officially announce that The Barbarians, a massive play I've been working on since 2016 (!) will receive its world premiere in February, 2025 at LaMama, on their gorgeous main stage, The Ellen Stewart Theater. I'm wild, I'm chuffed, I'm beyond excited for this. You can read the schmancy announcement here, and check out the great writeup we got in Vulture here.
As some of you may recall, I wrote this piece in the leadup to the 2016 election, a time that felt awash in horrible, painful, rhetoric. For the first time, I saw how words, mere words, were affecting my friends, my communities, my body. Everyone was exhausted, many were afraid. Simple things became difficult. All because of language, language made a weapon of control, of power.
Unfortunately, the rhetorical temperature has hardly cooled since then. And in the intervening years, as I kept working on the play, with director Paul Lazar and several incredible teams of actors, I found the play's questions - about how language becomes a tool for power, about how leaders and demagogues alike rely on the creation of a shadowy "them" to define a manipulable "us" - have only grown more germane.
And now, after a COVID-cancelled 2020 production, we finally have the chance to stage this wild, anarchic piece, and to do so on a scale I've only ever dreamed of. Just yesterday, at our production meeting, as I looked over the near-final designs for the set, I had to pinch myself at the sheer scale of this thing. I've never made anything close to this size before. I feel extremely lucky, and am thrilled to share it with you next year.
Look forward to seeing you at the show. This is gonna be a good one.
-Jerry