Reincarnations

Reincarnations plays with one idea: matter is never made or destroyed, it just keeps changing form. So every story is still around, and we can reach any of them from anywhere.

We borrow the shape from the Betal Pachisi, an old collection from the Kathasaritsagara, the eleventh-century Ocean of Stories. A king is told to carry a talking corpse across a graveyard, and the corpse keeps stopping to tell him tales and test what he has learned.

On stage it starts small. The audience names something they hate doing but have to do, like calling their parents or filing taxes. We paint the room where that life happens, an object in it comes alive to talk, and from there any player can pick up a thing in the space and follow it somewhere else: the factory that made it, the painter who made the painting, fifty years back, two hundred feet down. A prashna, an inquiry, snaps us home, and the answer earns a blessing or a curse that pushes the story on.

It is a forgiving format with almost nothing you can do wrong. The hope is that you follow the weird and find some joy and connection on the way.