HARP

(HERE Artist Residency Program)

Chimera • Deborah Stein & Suli Holum

Show Description

Taking at its starting point the real-life story of a Boston homemaker who discovered that she was her own twin, Chimera explores the relationship between the self and the body, motherhood and individuality, and what happens when biology shatters our ideas of who we think we are. A highly theatrical exploration of medical chimerism (the phenomenon of containing the genes of two different individuals within one body) and the ancient myth of the chimera (a fire-breathing monster, part lion, part goat, part snake—and all woman), this collaboration between playwright Deborah Stein and performer/creator Suli Holum is a play for one voice makes literal the solo performance convention of one performer embodying many, as this character’s central problem is that she literally contains multitudes.

Artist Bio

Suli Holum was a co-founder of Pig Iron Theatre Company where she developed work from 1996-2006. She wrote Pig Iron's Gentlemen Volunteers, winner of a Total Theatre Award (Edinburgh Fringe), and toured throughout the US and Europe. She was a performer/creator in Joseph Chaikin's collaboration with Pig Iron, Shut Eye, with text by Deborah Stein, at The Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), Dance Theatre Workshop (NYC), the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, the Wilma Theatre (Philadelphia), Theatre Artaud (San Francisco), and throughout Poland. Holum also collaborated with Stein as a performer/creator of Pig Iron's Anodyne. She won a Barrymore Award for choreography for Pig Iron's wordless Cafeteria, a Drama Desk Award for her performance in Israel Horowitz's Lebensraum off-Broadway, and a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday at Arena Stage. A recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship and a Shell Fellowship in Drama from the National Institute of Education in Singapore, she performed her original solo show, The Lollipop Project in Philaldelphia and Singapore. She directed two solo works, Leigh Garret's Lunacy Cycles (Dance New Amsterdam) and Brian Osborne's The Word (Philadelphia Live Arts Festival). Acting credits include: off-Broadway: Hot'n Throbbing, Courting Vampires, Live Girls; Regional: Humana Festival: At the vanishing point, Phoenix; Folger Shakepeare Library: Othello. TV: Law and Order: SVU. Holum co-directed and wrote Nichole Canuso Dance Company's site-specific Wandering Alice and wrote Oedipus at FDR, an adaptation of  Oedipus at Colonus for FDR Skatepark both produced by the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. She has a commission from Red Cape Theatre in Reading, England to write One Beach Road, a devised work about love, dementia, and coastal erosion. Holum teaches a blend of Lecoq, Viewpoints, and Post-Modern Dance to prepare performer/creators for the rigors of devised works.

Deborah Stein’s plays include God Save Gertrude, Wallflower, Bone Portraits and The Aerodynamics of Accident. Her work has been produced and developed nationally at Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the Theatre @ Boston Court, the Guthrie, the Children’s Theatre, Seattle Rep, Stages Rep, the Women’s Project, the Wilma Theatre, Azuka Theatre Company, Live Girls!, and Theatre Artaud; in New York at the Public Theatre, Dance Theatre Workshop, and Ars Nova; and internationally in Poland, Ireland, Edinburgh (the Traverse) and Prague. A frequent collaborator of the Pig Iron Theatre Company, she most recently worked on Welcome To Yuba City, and was twice nominated for the Barrymore Award for Best New Play, for The Lucia Joyce Cabaret and Shut Eye (dir. Joseph Chaikin). Her writing is published in Theatre Forum, Play: A Journal of Plays, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. She has been an artist in residence at Hedgebrook, Swarthmore College, Princeton University, the Tofte Lake Center for the Arts, and the Lexington Center, and has taught at NYU, Northeastern University, St. Olaf College, Parsons School of Design, and Brown University, where she received her MFA. Deborah is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis), where she is co-producing director of the Workhaus Collective. She is the recipient of a 2009-2011 Bush Artist Fellowship and a member of New Dramatists.

Artist Statement

Chimera is an opportunity for us—playwright and performer/creator—to revisit a foundational collaborative relationship that began almost ten years ago. This piece marks a return to the initial impulses that brought us to theatre in the first place: a commitment to devising new ways of telling a story by experimenting with form, to taking on deeply personal narratives that haunt us as individuals and making them speak to a broad spectrum of audience, and a core belief that plays are most vibrantly theatrical and alive when created through intensive collaboration.

Project Feed

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Chimera in MPLS, or, Wow. That Happened.

We had an amazing time in Minneapolis. We worked for three weeks and performed the piece four times for audiences and held talkbacks after each performance. Folks stayed and talked about science, about idenitity, about mothers and sons, and about...

Workhaus Workshop

Next up: a three-week workshop hosted by the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. Four open rehearsals on June 4, 6, 11, and 12. Click here for more info.

Brainstorm

First Steps

We just finished our first exploratory workshop, diving into the muck and seeing what sticks. We spent five great, intense days at New Dramatists working, researching, and playing with the research, joined along the way by Rachel Chavkin, Nichole Canuso,...

Research Images - A Beginning.

Some images related to the research we did in preparation for our first workshop in April, 2010.