ENSEMBLE & CREATIVE TEAM

MATT RECKEWEG Director
MICHAEL WINCH Music Director 
PATTI KALIL Set & Props
GENNA DAVIDSON Puppets 
KYRA CORRADIN Masks
FRANK LABOVITZ Costumes
NAVID AZEEZ Lights
ALEX LEIDY Media Designer
LEX DAVIS Fight Director
SADIE LEIGH ROTHMAN Movement Consultant

ERIC SWARTZ Stage Manager
SARAH WILBY Assistant Stage Manager

Scenery Provided by RENEGADE PRODUCTIONS

Cast:

FRANK CEVARICH Francis
MATTHEW SPARACINO Alan
RACHEL MENYUK Jane
LEX DAVIS Doctor Caligari

ZACHARY FERNEBOK
LEE GERSTENHABER
MADELINE KEY
SCOTT WHALEN

Musicians:

MICHAEL WINCH Violin
MADELINE WATERS Cello
RICK NETHERTON Bass

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Doctor Caligari premiered March 5, 2015 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint

PROGRAM NOTE

Pointless has had a long love affair with the European avant-garde of the early 20th Century. One of our first productions was inspired by the life of Hugo Ball, an Expressionist turned Dadaist. It seems fitting that for our tenth full production we turn to a masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. We wanted to pay homage to the 1920 classic, while giving ourselves permission to make the story our own. We were inspired by the film’s distinctively sharp and distorted design and composition. The stylized movement of the film seemed fitting to our performance techniques that aim to blur the lines between actor, dancer, and puppeteer. We’ve kept most of the film’s structure intact, eliminating very few scenes and embracing the darkly abstract, often nonlinear, emotional perspective of the main storyteller.

Our production contains many original elements, most notably the addition of puppetry and of course, an original musical score. The theme of manipulation drives the story and lends itself perfectly to puppetry. The music, inspired by expressionist compositions, is electronically distorted to suggest a descent into madness. Translating silent film to live performance led us to the choice of “mouthing” the text with title cards, emphasizing the story more specifically from the main character’s distorted point of view, a hallmark of Expressionist theatre. We kept the aesthetic of the black and white film by designing a graphic, hand-painted environment that emphasizes the expressionist love for abstraction. Limiting ourselves to shifts of bold, monochromatic lighting serves as a nod to the practice of color tinting common in the 1920’s. Condensing the cast to eight performers lead to actors playing multiple roles, a device not used in the original film. The ensemble takes on a much different role in our production, providing a sense of lurking menace and heightening the paranoia of the main storyteller

Doctor Caligari is a continuation of our past work that gleefully smashes the traditional boundaries between theatre, puppetry, dance, music, and the visual arts. Our spectacle, in which style becomes content and every element is highly affected, aims to create an intense visceral audience experience. We present a story of obsession, manipulation, paranoia, and distorted perspective. We hope you enjoy our journey through madness.