A music/theatrical event centered around Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle comprising twenty-one poems by Otto Erich Hartleben, sung in German in the startling technique of sprechstimme, which lay somewhere between speaking and singing. I was enlisted as director and also functioned as one of three dancers, performing with the onstage chamber musicians, led by Sarah Rothenberg on piano, and sung by soprano Lucy Shelton.

MOONDRUNK had three main characters, soldiers whose playful movements become progressively more sexual. When they shed their clothes, we see that one is a woman. Red ribbons, a metaphor for blood, are pulled from their bodies––from the heart, the vagina, the mouth, the anus. An awakening. In the final section, Nostalgia, the three performers assume the garb and perform the stock antics of characters from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte––Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin.

Concept by Sarah Rothenberg
Choreography, direction by John Kelly
music by Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, Johann Strauss
lyrics from poems by Otto Erich Hartleben
set design by Scott Pask
lighting design by Jennifer Tipton
Costume design by Donna Zakowska
hair and makeup design by Bobby Miller

Produced by Da Camera and the Lincoln Center Great Performers New Visions series.

World premiere: The Wortham Theater Center, Houston, TX, March 1998.

New York Premiere: The New Victory Theater, NY, January 1999.

WITH: Barbara Allen (Columbine), Guillermo Figueroa (violin), John Kelly (Pierrot), Jonathan Kinzel (Harlequin), David Krakauer (clarinet), Sarah Rothenberg (piano), Lucy Shelton (soprano), Fred Sherry (cello) and Carol Wincenc (flute).