LAPA is a mesmerizing language machine for the theater following Landman’s journey to pluck a newly formed star called Agam The Swan: “whoever tears down this star may choose to be freed from dreaming.” Treating language with the material curiosity of early abstract artists LAPA exposes the border of language and sound, of poetry and meaning. The Million Underscores stage this genre-bending work, modulating between visual composition, soundscape, performance, and choreography, to emphasize the distance between words, objects, sound, and the body.  Amidst Industrialization, the human ability to reach beyond the terrestrial, and a decrepit heaven, LAPA is a ballad for the end of dreaming.

Produced by The Million Underscores_ _ and The Brick Theater 

Written by: Daniil Kharms 

Directed by: Timothy Scott and Nicolás Noreña

Translation from Russian: C. Dylan Basset and Emma Winsor Wood, Matvei Yankelevich

Featuring: Hannah Gross, Marija Kovačević, Alessandro Magania, Madison Mayer, Erin Mullin, Nicolás Noreña and Timothy Scott 

Assistant Director: Madison Mayer 

Lighting Design: Daisy Long 

Scenic Design: Nicolás Noreña 

Poster design: Emma Berliner 

Join us March 12 after the show for:

Matvei Yankelevich in conversation with THE MIILLION UNDERSCORES _ _ 

Moderated by Theresa Buchheister 

Stay for a post show conversation with Matvei Yankelevich. We’ll talk about LAPA, Daniil Kharms, translation, our day and age, theater, poetry and whatever else the audience brings up! 

Matvei Yankelevich edited and translated Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook), and is the co-translator (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. His most recent book of poetry is Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for translation and the New York Foundation for the Arts for poetry, as well as a National Endowment for Humanities fellowship for a forthcoming translation of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks. He is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and has curated UDP’s Eastern European Poets Series since 2002. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is a member of the Writing Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Theresa Buchheister is a Kansan New Yorker and founder and co-director of Title:Point (an experimental theatre company), founder and Artistic Director of The Exponential Festival (a Brooklyn performance festival),  and co-founder of Vital Joint (a weird basement venue in Brooklyn). Theresa directs, produces, performs, curates, facilitates and writes for theatre and theatre-adjacent performance realms. Theresa is a voice over director, teacher, performer, engineer (Cartoons:  BoyGirlDogCatMouseCheese, Pokemon, Denver and more. Audiobooks: How Music Works, Leaving the Sea, The Water Castle, The Perks of Being A Wallflower and more.) 

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The Million Underscores are a “mad and wonderful” (David Herskovits- Target Margin Theater) experimental theater company based in Brooklyn under the artistic direction of Nicolas Noreña. Founded in Summer 2013  the company has developed alongside a qualitative study of numbers, and experiments in aesthetic drive, abstract composition, and collaborative writing. 

Their work has been presented at MoMA, Target Margin Theater, Vital Joint, Triskelion Arts, Mabou Mines, Movement Research, and The Brick Theater among others. 

We make highly visual and physical eccentric theater works that interrogate the action and form of theater. We value every element of performance as an independent voice. Through density, multidirectionality and juxtaposition we generate fields for the audience to notice, think and reify modes of perception, organization and understanding. 

photos by Jose Miranda