Experimental theater is alive and well in New York City! Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, one of the oldest experimental theaters in New York City, now in its 48th year, is currently in production of a Russian tragicomedy Fourteen Little Red Huts.
The play is an unsparing account of a small collective farm whose members are imprisoned by ideology and facing starvation. The little collective by the Caspian Sea hosts a one hundred year old European polymath who sees nothing but good in the cruelty and absurdity of Stalin's murderous policies and has an assortment of Russian characters who are variously trapped in their increasingly dire circumstances.
In the mid 1930s Platonov observed conditions in the collective farms at first hand. His play is a magnificent response to an atrocious reality that manages to elevate the grim facts into universal art. Voltaire once wrote "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Fourteen Little Red Huts is a terrifying comic satirical play that has profound implications far beyond the time and the place in which it is set.
With the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution upon us what better way to think about the consequences of Soviet power?
As you know the Arts is underfunded in America and Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble has felt the brunt of this over the last few years. As one of the few experimental theaters still in existence it depends on public support to survive.
Thank you for supporting experimental theater!