La Divina Caricatura

Bunraku Meets Motown

Lee Breuer

 

6 x 9 inches, 216 pp. July 2018

ISBN : 9780857425577

Rs  499.00 (PB)
$35.00 (PB)
£22.00 (PB)

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La Divina Caricatura is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, a feature animation come alive. It is Bunraku theatre for the American sensibility. It is 'pataphysical' Dante where souls are cartoons represented in the halfway house of Purgatorio as those cubic cartoons known as puppets, themselves halfway houses between flesh and the pixel. If Alfred Jarry, who invented pataphysics and reinvented black humour, had been a Dante buff, he might have also invented the characters that string Lee Breuer's plays together: Rose the Dog, who thinks she is a woman; her lover John, a junkie filmmaker; Ponzi Porco, PhD, a pig in love with the New York Times; and the Warrior Ant, who, to impress his father, Trotsky the Termite, declares the 'perpetual revolution' of the bugs of the fifth world. Each a soul on its own pilgrimage, seldom with a Virgil or a Beatrice to guide them, they often try to guide each other, only to get more lost, for this 'Pilgrims' Progress' is on the Wheel of Life, never straight ahead but up, down, over and back and around and around again. 

Lee Breuer is a playwright, director, and founding artistic director of Mabou Mines Theater in New York.
 

 

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