#vatheatre

#TBT to our Vegas inspired production of 'Much Ado About Nothing'. Philip Fletcher and Irina Tsikurishvili made Much Ado About Synetic in this performance, and are making Much Ado about Revenge right now with our production of 'Titus Andronicus'

#TBT to our 2016 performance of 'The Taming of the Shrew' and one of the coolest pictures we have of our Shakespeare productions. Check out 'Titus Andronicus', No. 13 in our Wordless Shakespeare cannon, on stage now!

#TBT to our production of Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra'. This was one of our largest scale productions because how could do you that show and *not* have a pyramid on stage? Check out Lucky Number 13 in our "Wordless Shakespeare Series", 'Titus Andronicus', on stage now through May 27.

#TBT to Synetic Theater’s very first production in their Wordless Shakespeare Series, ‘Hamlet...the rest is silence’. Lucky Number 13 in the series, ‘Titus Andronicus’, is playing now!

With the music, our main focus is trying to describe the inner life of Josef K. with sound, to reach the heart of the absurd world Kafka created in his novel, and looking for a soundscape to match this. So we're going for a very strange, atonal, and distorted general sound to capture that. Since the world of Kafka is very bleak and spare, we're trying to find the right kind of music to reflect this as well. We want a very minimalistic sound, to not overwhelm the text, and we're also primarily using classical instrumentation, run through a lot of filters, changed, molded, and reshaped to give the music an entirely different and unexpected quality. I think this reflects K's mindset throughout the novel and our adaptation of it, since K himself has no idea what's going on or what's around the corner. The music we've developed has a very unsettling quality to it, which I think is a good reflection of everything contained in the novel.    

Run of Show: January 17, 2018 >> February 18, 2018 Tickets: http://synetictheater.org/event_pages/the-trial/

I think what was most difficult about adapting Kafka's 'The Trial' for the stage was the fact that there's virtually no plot to speak of. Reading it on the page is one thing, but having to give that dramatic shape and meaning is something else entirely. It's very farcical and surreal, and I was glad to see that our performers--and I think this is one of the strongest casts we've had--were eager to embrace that, to explore and play with it, and offer their own interpretations, both of the script and of Kafka's novel. It was great to see how they were finding stuff in the script that I myself didn't know was there. That's the beauty, I think, of having such ambiguous and open-ended material. But with that ambiguity comes a lot of mystery, a lot of questions. What I wanted was the audience to feel K's panic and claustrophobia at all this confusion, as his world slowly closes in on him. That's where a lot of the story's horror and menace come from, but at the same time, for me at least, the novel is also a pitch-black comedy. After all, at some point, you just can't do anything in the face of all the absurdity but laugh. And I wanted some variety in there, so the play wouldn't be so unrelentingly bleak, to highlight the novel's black-comedy elements. For me, Kafka's 'Trial' is a great balance of all that, and, hopefully, this will come through in the final production.   

Run of Show: January 17, 2018 >> February 18, 2018 Tickets: http://synetictheater.org/event_pages/the-trial/