The Way at Midnight

The Way at Midnight is a thematically ambitious, emotionally rich performance and cultural organizing salon that explores how the legacy of colonization lives in our bodies and impacts our lives. Surprisingly humorous, it is a call and response between the past, present and future. It is a yearning for justice and a reckoning between the timely and the timeless, where personal memories collide with histories left off the map.

Our performance begins with two old men, mysteriously summoned into the woods at sundown to officiate a stranger’s funeral. But when the men get there, they realize they don’t know whom they are supposed to bury. They split up, and as they wander into the forest to search for clues, history, time and geography collapse, opening a portal to the ancient past and the hyper-future. The two main characters, Izzy and Renaud, become seven, all channeled in the bodies of two actors, and all on interconnected journeys to reckon with—and maybe even reimagine—their heritage and legacy.

In 2019, when the violence of patriarchy and white supremacy occupy the headlines and our hearts, we ask: How can these two white men reckon with the damage that has been done in their names? How can their descendants imagine something different? Ancestral DNA leaps across generations and projection screens into the bodies of the performers, who play multiple characters–young anarcho-punks with a band and a scheme to hack collective memory, a dead conquistador haunted by his past, a gay Korean War veteran hilariously righting the lies told about him in death, and a grandmother’s ghost. Moving within Miwa Matrayek’s animated projections and Peter Bowling’s live digital soundscapes, these characters spend 90 minutes traversing a landscape of disorientation and discovery with the precise, crashing momentum of a drum solo. They are looking for ghosts, humor, the truth of hidden histories, and absolution.

The Way at Midnight’s expansive tapestry of characters and landscapes are woven together by Miwa Matreyek’s stunning projections. Miwa, who came to animation by way of collage, works at the intersection of handmade and high-tech. This synthesis is a natural fit for a show whose characters traverse the distance between a Spanish conquistador mapping the New World by hand and punk rock hackers intent on coding with their genetic code so the past and the future can talk to one another. Using multiple projectors, Miwa animates a transforming world of hoisted ship sails, live video streams and analog televisions. Her work moves us seamlessly between disparate landscapes: wild forests, Colonial Spain, an abandoned warehouse, Korean War flashbacks and memories of days spent saltwater fishing with your grandmother.

Collaborators

Director: Joanna Russo
Writers: Joanna Russo, Hannah Pepper-Cunningham & Nick Slie
Performers: Hannah Pepper-Cunningham & Nick Slie
Creative Producer: Dan Pruksarnukul
Animation: Miwa Matrayek
Composer: Peter J Bowling
Designer: Kevin Griffith
Light Design: Joan Long
Projection Mapping: Dan Pruksarnukul
Costumes: Zibby Jahns
Stage-Manager: Mallory E. S. Heath