A highly-visual deconstructed tragicomedy, Needles was inspired by Christopher Bollas’s The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. Needles tells the story of Wilhelm as he struggles with his inability to reconcile the randomness of the universe. The work, 60 minutes in length, includes five characters: Wilhelm, Evil 1 and Evil 2, Tiny 3rd and a Polar Bear. The last four are all imaginings (hallucinations) of Wilhelm’s brain. They flatter and torture him as he tries to comprehend the accidental death of his wife, killed by a stray bullet in the street.

Wilhelm plays out his torment, aided and hindered by his companions, in a set within a set, a stage within a stage, a brightly colored box inside a painter’s scaffold. Wilhelm’s hallucinations crawl around the scaffold, dancing, leering, tormenting him with objects that they push, drop and dangle through trap doors in the ceiling and holes in the walls. Needles has an array of extraordinary and elaborate costumes, props and puppets which take on a comedic and terrifying life of their own. The piece mixes the exacting symbolism of objects and physical gesture with a sonorous, operatic text and sound script. It is a mnemonic theater of hallucinogenic clarity.

PRODUCTION HISTORY . . . February 1999, New York Performance Works, New York City