Cleansedby Sarah Kane
Performances
Cast & Personnel
Director
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
Video Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager
Production Design
The Play
“Love me or kill me.”
Sarah Kane’s brief, boundary breaking career prompted the terms “a theatre of extremes” and “an ethics of catastrophe.” In a former university, society’s “undesirables” are imprisoned and subjected to a series of tortures designed to test the limits of human love on the battlefield of the human body. Explosively aching, hauntingly poetic, and disarmingly tender, Cleansed is a fever-dream fable of unimaginable brutality and miraculous beauty. This whiplash for the soul comes soaked through with hope. Cleansed is undeniably a love story. Given this country’s immediate threat to the bodies and lives of those that look, live, or love in ways that deviate from the most conservative societal ‘norms’, 25 years after it was written, Cleansed feels nightmarishly prescient.
The regional premiere of Cleansed is co-directed by Jason Nodler and T Lavois Thiebaud with production design by Afsaneh Aayani and James Templeton, reuniting the team that created last season’s production of Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, which The Houston Press called “an imaginative bulldozer of a production” and “a testament to the collaborative work that happens when two theater artists [Thiebaud and Nodler] are performing at the top of their game.”
The Playwright
"What frightened me was the depth of (Kane's) horror and anguish. Everyone's aware, to varying degrees, of the cruelty of mankind, but we manage to compromise with it, put it on the shelf and not think about it for a good part of the day. But I don't think she could do that. I think she had a vision of the world that was extremely accurate, and therefore horrific. Because the world is a fucking awful place. It's a very beautiful place, but this species mankind is an absolute bloody disaster. The elements of sadism are astonishing. She wasn't simply observing mankind; she was part of it. It seems to me she was talking about the violence within herself, the hatred within herself, and the depths of misery that she also suffered."- Harold Pinter
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