Paul and Elisabeth, emotionally-sheltered teenage siblings, create a fantasy world governed by rules and rituals only children understand. As they vie for dominance, they play cruel games with their companions, Gerard and Agatha. Reality encroaches, fantasies unravel, and their worlds collapse. Is tragedy inevitable? Divine?
Maysie Jane Kilgore
Michael Gardner says, “Jean Cocteau’s novella, Les Enfants Terribles, feels like one of those subversive secrets you discover at some point in your reading life. It guts and delights you and breaks all the rules in a way you thought was not allowed. Sexy and verboten, heartbreaking and wrong. It reminds you of a time in your youth when playtime was more real than reality. And playtime had just as many rules. The book cries out for theatricality, describing the children’s “room” as the set of a stage drama upon which they all play. I’ve been longing to create a literalization of their “play” for years. And the themes of cruelty, persecution and mythomania couldn’t be more timely.”
Caroline De Fazio
“A child plays at horses and becomes a horse. A mythomaniac reads Les Enfants Terribles. He plays at horses and thinks he is a horse.” – Jean Cocteau (from his autobiography The Difficulty of Being)
Rutger Scott
The cast includes Caroline (Lina) DeFazio, Victor Gao, Maysie Jane Kilgore and Rutger Scott.
Hannah Kunce is Intimacy Director and Bethany Qian is Production Stage Manager.
Performances are Wednesdays – Saturdays at 7pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm. Run time is approximately 100 minutes. Ages 18+. Tickets are $25 and $15 for students.
The full schedule is here: https://crawlspace.simpletix.com
To purchase tickets and for more info visit https://www.enfantsplay.com.
About Michael Gardner:
Micheal Gardner (https://www.michaelgardnerdirects.com) is a playmaker and filmmaker and the proprietor of Crawl Space Plays, LLC. He is a Founder and former Artistic Director of The Brick Theater (2002 to 2019). Recent film projects (written & directed) include I Watch Buildings and kintsugi: a VR theatre experience. Directorial works for stage include Breakfast at Blooms (segments), Brandywine Distillery Fire (2015 NYITA nominee “Outstanding Performance Art Production”), Notes from Underground and Vaclav Havel’s Mountain Hotel (English Language premiere). Adapted and directed: The Ninja Cherry Orchard, The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and In a Strange Room (Top Ten Plays, 2004—Time Out NY).
About Crawl Space Plays
Crawl Space Plays, LLC is a production company, a venue and place for developing experimental and non-traditional artworks. Performance, film, VR and other arts are presented at their BedStuy studio, crawlspace, and in other traditional and non-traditional theater spaces. The company was born during the pandemic, and is not currently divided into seasons. Les Enfants Terribles will be the fourth production produced by the company, following Breakfast at Blooms (an adaptation of Molly’s chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses), ghost light: a VR theatre experience, and enfants (a workshop precursor to Les Enfants Terribles).
photo credit- Travis Emory Hackett
