Photo by Christy Pessagno
A cycle of spoken tales offset by songs, dances, and video projections, Montgomery Park, or Opulence tells the history of a strange and powerful building. Asking where the boundaries between conscious beings lie, the play creates a mood of deep listening within a luminous environment, reimagining the theater as an intimate chamber within an archival installation.
Performed by Karinne Keithley and Katy Pyle, with additional video performances by David Brooks, Heidi Schreck, and others.
“She’s a major talent, a Renaissance woman.” — Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
“Ms. Keithley’s childlike but sophisticated language... guides us into meditations on the nature of being alive and present, of emotional exhaustion and replenishment, of those experiences that can’t be verified but are deeply felt... It’s all marvelously strange.” — Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times
About The Artist
Karinne Keithley has been making performance in New York City since 1997. She is a member of the radical playwrights posse JOYCE CHO and the women's writing group MACHIQQ, with both of whom she is actively involved in articulating and developing performance strategies for new plays. As a writer her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, SoHo Rep, New York Theater Workshop, the Flea Theater, and Brooklyn College, where she studied on scholarship with Mac Wellman, earning an MFA in playwriting in 2006. Her play, Do Not Do This Ever Again was produced as part of the Ice Factory ’08, directed by Maria Goyanes. Her video work has been seen in multiple editions of the CATCH! Series, as well as in Sibyl Kempson’s recent Potatoes of August. Her dance theater piece, Tenderenda, was commissioned by Danspace Project in 2005. She was a member of the St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab twice (2005-6; 2008). She has performed with Young Jean Lee, David Neumann, Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parsons, and in multiple works by Sara Smith and Chris Yon, as well as in her own work at P.S. 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, Galapagos Art Space, and Ur, a dance palace (2003-5) she co-founded with Chris Yon. She is the founder of the 53rd State Press, which publishes new plays, and is currently working on a doctorate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.