Daniel Fish, Tony Award nominated director for his revival of Oklahoma! on Broadway, brings a new work freely inspired by Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise to NYU Skirball. The 70 minute performance extracts it’s text entirely from the novel’s teeming lists, creating an obsessive reduction of the novel’s prescient themes: rampant consumerism, environmental disaster, guns, media saturation, underground conspiracy, fear of death and the disintegration of the nuclear family.
Originally staged in 2018 by Theater Freiburg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen in Germany, White Noise is performed by actor Bruce McKenzie with live accompaniment by composer/drummer Bobby Previte. Jim Findlay’s video design features nineteen teenagers from Freiburg, Germany and is projected on Andrew Leiberman’s monumental set which encapsulates McKenzie in the center of the image.
This U.S. premiere is a collaboration between Fish, McKenzie, Findlay, Lieberman, Doey Lüthi (costume), Previte, Alexandra Caffal (associative director), Stacey Derosier (light) and the nineteen teenagers from Freiburg, Germany seen on video.
White Noise may be most appropriate for ages 11 and up, but all are welcome. Please note there will be no late seating.
Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays and found audio. Recent work includes Oklahoma! (Broadway and St. Ann’s Warehouse), Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta (Prototype Festival), Don’t Look Back (The Chocolate Factory), Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place (Curtis Opera), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Center), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM NEXT WAVE, L.A. Opera, San Francisco Opera), and Eternal. His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, and his residencies and commissions include The MacDowell Colony, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MOCA, The Chocolate Factory and The Bushwick Starr. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater. danielfish.net
NYU Skirball’s educational and enrichment programming is made possible in part with generous support from Con Edison.
