An Erotic Nightmare

Directed by Brad Krumholz
Featuring Wade Bowen, Rosaruby Glaberman, Sarah Dey Hirshan, and Patricia Skarbinski

TERROTICA premiered at The Ohio Theatre, NYC, for a 4-week run,
October 23 to November 16, 2003

Notes from the Director
on TERROTICA:

"In March, 2003 I began working with a group of actors on a new piece called, TERROTICA. At that time all that was known was that I wanted to investigate, through the creation of an original, physically-based, ensemble theatre performance, the point at which the arousal of the erotic and the arousal of fear coincide. We spent 6 of the next 8 months working tirelessly, 4-5 days per week for 4 months, and 2 months full-time at NACL's theatre center in the Catskill Mountains. The completed performance enjoyed a 4-week run at the Ohio Theatre in SoHo in October/November 2003.

TERROTICA is billed as "An Erotic Nightmare." By creating a theatrical environment in which anything can happen, anywhere, at any given moment, and by having images, texts, films, and movement reflected and refracted throughout the piece, TERROTICA becomes the place of a dream. It is a dream played out in the flesh, intimately, before an audience, so that the audience, after the show, might have the rare opportunity to analyze the dream they have just shared, in hopes of understanding something more about the dark land of TERROTICA inside themselves.

Since the performance needs to feel like a dream, it is not possible to use traditional theatrical conventions of narrative storytelling. However, as in a dream, the events which unfold in close proximity to the audience-- which sit along the two long sides of the 50 ft. wide playing space-- need to have a certain coherence of rhythm and image, even as the narrative line becomes more and more fragmented.

The play begins with a couple, clearly facing marital dysfunction. They are going on a "vacation" to resolve their relationship problems. Very soon, it becomes clear that they are not alone; rather, they are "haunted" by two spirits, who have some stake in forcing the couple to delve into the darkest places of their subconscious minds. As the events unfurl, the layers of civility (along with layers of clothing...) are stripped away, and the foursome come to inhabit TERROTICA, in which nakedness, horrific masks, blood ritual, and violence clash in a surreal dreamscape tinged with a heated erotic charge.

Along the way, aided by audio overdubs (text by Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Octavio Paz, Sigmund Freud, etc.) and 16mm film projected onto the moving set pieces, it becomes clear that the need for some sort of reconciliation between fear and sexuality is much more than just one couple's struggle. TERROTICA is the erotic nightmare of our culture, and its content is symbolic of our culture's psychological dysfunction."

-- Brad Krumholz