Blurb text.
UNCLE! required the creation of a porous ritual site, an environment that could reach back in time/space/memory while remaining firmly grounded in the present-day performance space at Westbeth. Using a concentric-circle motif insipired by architect Louis Kahn's writings on design for sacred space, we set up a fragmented in-the-round audience layout that allowed for a central playing space and an ambulatory, partially-obscured performance pathway at the perimeter. Arrays of of heavy-duty strapping spanned the loft's many columns to suggest a tree canopy or constellation, while also providing an architectonic expression of the performance's themes of tension and release, connection and alienation.
"[Yanow's] playful, and at times, wrenching invitation to the audience to call “Uncle!” throughout the show initiates the audience into the pack as fellow members of the chorus of figures ... charting 'shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse' across Jewish and queer identities."
Miciah Hussey, MOMUS