Public Rehearsal „Pizza or A Door In The Dark Does Not Dance Or The Meaning Of Life“

Pizza or A Door In the Dark Does Not Dance or The Meaning of Life is a chamber opera, miniature in scale physically, as since the pandemic, we are back to using and transforming into questionable art absolutely anything and everything available (which given the sorry state of our culture world, isn’t much, other than devotion, sense of mission, and tireless hard labor) but material lack has never daunted us. As always, the show—if we’re allowed to call this ultimately a religious service a “show”—is uncompromisingly epic and outsize in its scope and ambition, with impossible choreographies and suchlike terpsichorean feats (as if singing opera without any formal training, both for the performers as well as spectators, wasn’t a challenge enough) the audience is seeing and hearing, essentially purchasing, two shows—at least two, but likely more— for the price of one, a fact which in this economic shitshow of a times must not be sneezed at.

Superficially, on a stupid plot level—if anyone still cares about linear plot in our irreparably fractured, fragmented world—the first act takes place at a pizza party which starts innocently and lightly enough, but when one of the guests reveals that they’re dying of a mysterious illness, and disappears from the festivities, her presumed death becomes a portal to the next world, populated by ghosts of other dead (or possibly dead) beings who have scores to settle and questions that need answers.

Pizza is delivered from a local parlor, and everyone gets a delicious slice, perhaps even a message of hope from the delivery man. But is he also dead? Just one of the ghosts, taking advantage of the portal between life and death being temporarily open and unguarded – to sneak into our realm and confuse us even more than we already are?

Is this where we actually exist? Ever between two antagonistic, battling states? It’s hard, isn’t it? But it’s easier to cope when we’re all together, the performers and the audience sharing the same struggle to understand our purpose in life and come to terms with the inevitability and impossibility of death.

As per usual in Nature Theater of Oklahoma, underneath these showbusiness shenanigans —there is, as always, roiling, an earnest, unironic desire to communicate with the audience their experience of working and living in the world, to make sense of life, history, and art, but especially theater, the most messy, unhygienic, impractical, unwieldy and wastefully expensive medium of them all.

The truth is that the pandemic has changed us in ways we haven’t even begun to realize, and it has devastated the theater. But Nature Theater of Oklahoma, rather than bemoaning this reality and throwing in the towel, sees this as an opportunity for a new beginning, a chance to reinvent the artform, using leftover tropes dug up from the rubble. What are we doing here? Do we need to get together in one room and breathe on each other, putting our physical health at risk? Or are we risking much more than our health if we stop touching and breathing on each other? Periodically getting dirty with fellow human beings is healthy. Germs are our friends, and they’re bound to be on this special slice of pizza.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning art and performance group from New York under the direction of Pavol Liška and Kelly Copper. With each new project, they attempt to set an impossible challenge for themselves, the audience, and their collaborators - working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness and rigor.
Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work - Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.