Institute History
Description
Our project for Sundance Theatre Lab 2000 is to develop a one-man show based on Barry Yourgrau’s book of linked stories, HAUNTED TRAVELLER: AN IMAGINARY MEMOIR.
HAUNTED TRAVELLER presents a man’s rootless search for love & connection – as a chronicle of exotic, quirky & astonishing travels. This chronicle employs the grand poses & atmospherics of travel writing and mixes them with eerie Gothic horrors, noir-ish fables, surreal adventure yarns, and lamplit comic fairy tales.
Glimpses of autobiographical family memoirs weave through the work, along with introspective dialogues & monologues. So the heart of the enterprise emerges: a man’s intimate confessional self-portrait, expressed as voyages of imagination. Someone traveling to worlds in his head.
Our challenge in theatricalizing HAUNTED TRAVELLER is to celebrate its post-modern visions in a way that creates & reinforces that emotional thru-line, crucial if we are to have a compelling evening in the theater.
—Barry Yourgrau and Itamar Kubovy