Fixing Mister B - The (Theatrically) Staged Reading
Join a talented group of actors from Lafayette, Louisiana as they catapult through an adventure in which live theatre, cinematography, and AI imagery collide to produce an unforgettable theatrically-staged reading of "Fixing Mister B" -- a new play by Daniel Povinelli, directed by Scott Gremillion.
Grounded in historical events surrounding the making of one of the earliest scientific documentaries, the play explores the increasingly uneasy relationship between media technology, authenticity and human story-telling.
THE STORY: Meet Dr. Gustav Störring, an ambitious young psychologist working to make a name for himself during the rise of Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. Into his hands falls a strange patient, Mr. B, who seems to upend modern theories of human memory and consciousness — indeed, the very notion of what it means to be a person. Caught in a storm of international excitement and skepticism, and the grip of domestic fascism, Störring sets out to make a documentary using state of the art recording technology to permanently fix the phenomenon on film. If successful, his critics will be forced to relent. But as his obsession with Mr. B grows, so too do his doubts about the authenticity of the motives, memories and experiences of everyone involved, including himself. His film quickly takes on a life of its own as he desperately clings to his increasingly surreal recordings as the final arbiter of fact and fiction, authenticity and duplicity. Join us for a kaleidoscopic descent into one man's unholy attempt to control the most powerful illusion of them all — the human mind.
CAST:
Aren Chaisson - Dr. Gustav Störring
Katryn Schmidt - Anni
Peter Lagarde - Mr. B
Peggy Dersch - Actor #1
Trevor Chapman - Actor #2
Grady Elmore - Actor #3
Cara Baque - Director
Daniel Ladmirault - Narrator
This performance is part of ArtSpaces, a program providing venue access at the Baton Rouge Arts Council to empower local creatives and organizations in fostering community engagement and artistic enrichment.
