New Castings

PPL's 'The Last Dreams of Helene Weigel or How to Get Rid of the Feminism Once and for All' turns the squeamish sensations and perverse paranoia attached to "Feminism" into an operetta. How can we identify any single person as a "woman"? How can we separate any individual from their sex? Can an individual represent, portray, or explain the experience an entire sex? Can a woman have visions? Or only dreams?

This pseudo-biography of the woman most famous for having been Bertolt Brecht's wife (Helene Weigel) is decidedly anti-Brechtian; hers is one of reaching out to the audience with wild-eyed populist desperation for theatrical communication and the formation of identity through social performance.

Helene's visions—which occur instead of arias as emotional outbursts—depict dirty battle fought alongside Héloïse d'Argenteuil, the 12th Century philosopher (best known in light of her lover Abelard's castration). Over the course of the piece, Helene's visions construct a narrative genealogy of "Feminism," "Mystique" through "Man-eating" formally contained inside a of dense framework of sample-driven music composed by Brian McCorkle and played live by PPL band $700 Hammer: cello, violin, vibraphone, electric guitar, keyboard, sampler, and saxophone.

The piece also uses video of elaborately staged interviews with "real live" women (one speaks from a bed of cake, another while fishing encyclopedias out of a pond) and informational choral sequences that merge dance, women's choir, and PhD seminar, creating an informational, post-dramatic, phantasmagoric exploration of the Female.