In Notre Dame Professor Joyelle McSweeney's award-winning, eco-farcical rewiring of The Tempest, Julian Assange pilots a hijacked containership full of Dead Youth towards Magnetic Island, planning to revive them/upload them onto the Internet; not one but two rival hijackers aims to thwart this mission, while presiding deity Henrietta Lacks looks on with grave displeasure.
This outrageous farce poses serious questions: can Justice survive the Anthropocene? Can Justice survive on a planet riven with racial, gendered, economic, environmental, colonialist, and ableist inequalities? Chicago's Runaways Lab Theater reprise their hilarious and haunting production of this timely work.
Contains adult or mature content. This is a free but ticketed event. Tickets will only be available for pick-up one hour prior to the performance. To guarantee your reservation please pick-up your Will Call tickets at least 15 minutes prior to the performance. In the event of a sell out, unclaimed Will Call tickets will be used to seat patrons waiting on standby.
Originally published DPAC Events
DEAD YOUTH, OR, THE LEAKS
Joyelle McSweeney, author
November 29
7:30pm-9:30pm
Philbin Studio Theatre DPAC
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, Gender Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.
Winner of the First Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers
In this farce set on a hijacked containership on its way to Magnetic Island, Julian Assange attempts to “reboot” a troupe of DEAD YOUTH—teenagers from all over the globe who have died in violent circumstances from sweatshop labor to environmental poisoning to war—but must grapple with two other would-be hijackers: a young Somali pirate and a female Antoine de St-Exupery. Described by its author as a “badly-wired allegory,” Dead Youth, or, The Leaks brings to manic light the veiled violence that makes life in capitalism possible.
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of three books of poetry and three books of prose, most of which also contain plays. Her most recent titles include The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a book of transnational, transgenre poetics essays (University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series, 2015), Percussion Grenade(Fence), and Salamandrine, 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press). She is a founder of the international press Action Books and a contributor to the culture site Montevidayo.org. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
PRAISE FOR DEAD YOUTH, OR, THE LEAKS
Like all of Joyelle McSweeney’s work, Dead Youth refuses to settle into any easy category, delivering a theater experience that’s simultaneously transgressive, classical, visionary, political, and gothic. Although built for the stage, these words still slip, skid, pop, and burrow throughout the page, creating a daisy chain of unexpected associations and indelible effects.
JEFF JACKSON
Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, is the shocking gaze upon the most beautiful and obscene gesture that is survival itself. This work takes as truth the statement that violence is such stuff as dreams are made of, that genocide can be converted to a legible surface, that oppression can be exhalation, that knowledge can be devastation, that violence can be humanistic and natural, staggering, immersive. In other words, Dead Youth is a farce, perhaps, but built on the exploitation and death and misery that becomes charisma and complication and sacredness. Heavy, yet easy to consume for its beautiful and profound images, indigestible, yet productive and rapacious in the indigestion that it produces. This is a work like none other. Let the destruction of the world become the rhythm of your life.
JANICE LEE
I’ve never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn’t totally exciting. She’s one of the most interesting people working now in terms of the forms she uses, and she’s extremely deft, and playful, and yet the stuff that’s going on, content-wise, is really super-smart, and has really good politics and stuff. I just find her a thrilling font of new stuff.
DENNIS COOPER FOR DAZED DIGITAL
Originally publised at Litmus Press