SLEEPING GIANT
Performing at 1020 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington DC 20036
DIRECTIONS
October 4 – November 3, 2024
“…eerie… epic… oddball and otherworldly… met the script’s challenges with unholy glee.”
— WASHINGTON POST (CLICK HERE for the full review)
When a firework-filled marriage proposal goes very wrong, the accompanying explosions wake up something very old that has been sleeping in the nearby lake for thousands of years. What follows are intimate, darkly comic, and sometimes startling vignettes about the lengths people go to when they desperately want to believe in something.
Written by Emmy-nominated Steve Yockey, the playwright of previous Rorschach shows VERY STILL AND HARD TO SEE and REYKJAVIK, and the emmy-nominated creator of the TV series THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT (HBO) and the DEADBOY DETECTIVES (Netflix).
Rorschach’s temporary home, a 2-story former men’s clothing store at Farragut North offers an engaging lobby experience with visual art, photo ops, and a gift shop to explore before descending into the subterranean theatre and bar.
“Rorschach Theatre’s production of Steve Yockey’s SLEEPING GIANT reveals itself in layers. As its peculiarities bloom, so do its insights. As the monster rises from the deep, so do the monsters among us — and the lost, the forgotten, the lonely, the hopeless, and the hopeful.”
— DC THEATER ARTS (CLICK HERE for the full review)
SLEEPING GIANT does not rely on jump-scares, but the dread of a world beyond our living room that holds no respect for either our moral sentiments or normative expectations. And yet, this production allows it to be both wickedly and subtly satirical.
–WASHINGTON CITY PAPER (CLICK HERE for the full review)
“What emerges, as Yockey’s characters grapple with the ever-spreading influence of the lake monster news, is a contemplation of the manifold ways in which the ancient lizard part of our nominally civilized brains can govern our reactions to the surprising, the perplexing, the unexplained and the unexplainable. The darkly puckish suggestion of Sleeping Giant is that our desperate need to find meaning in everything we encounter may well be what drives some of our more curious (dare we say cultish?) choices — an observation with implications for our understanding of not just politics but religion and social movements as well.
“If you’re thinking this sort of material might be right up Rorschach Theatre’s alley — they’re working in a vacant Rochester Big & Tall store at the moment, not in an actual alley, though I wouldn’t put it past them — you’re onto something. It’s a company with a distinct appetite for the oddball and the otherworldly, an heir in many ways to the transgressively esoteric aesthetic that helped put Woolly Mammoth on the national theater map.”
— WASHINGTON POST (CLICK HERE for the full review)
The play contains some adult content
CLICK HERE
for more detailed content information
CLICK HERE FOR A COPY OF THE DIGITAL PROGRAM
SLEEPING GIANT
By Steve Yockey
Directed by Jenny McConnell Frederick
FEATURING Robert Bowen Smith, Erin Denman, Sydney Dionne, Jacob Yeh.
UNDERSTUDIES: Semaj Kelly, Tiana Lockhart, Sarah Millard, Taylor Stevens
DESIGNED BY Sarah Beth Hall (Set), Ashlynne Ludwig (Costumes), Dean Leong (Lights), Thom J. Woodward (Sound), Aoife Creighton (Props), and Kylos Brannon (Video).
WITH Leica Long (Stage Manager), Natasha Sánchez (Assistant Stage Manager), Madelyn Southard (Technical Director), Daelyn Funk (Assistant Lighting Designer and Master Electrician), Jillian Skara (Assistant Costume Designer and Second Assistant Stage Manager), Mardelle Singleton (Second Assistant Stage Manager), Lorraine Ressegger (Intimacy Coordinator), Sean Flaherty (Production Associate), and Germar Townsend (Production Manager).
PRODUCED BY Randy Baker and Jenny McConnell Frederick
This project is produced in partnership with Lerner Enterprises
and The Golden Triangle BID
and with support provided by the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities.
