Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University. 

Go see Absinthe, Opium and Magic at the Art/Works Theatre. I beg you. Go early and be sure to experience all three first-hand. Well, maybe not the opium. But you’ll certainly feel like you partook in mind-bending drugs once the performance begins. I’m sure you’ve never seen such an interesting, delightful and gory way of representing Shanghai in the 1920s. I was sitting in the audience laughing hysterically one second and gasping the next while peeking out of a slit between my fingers over my eyes. I thought to myself, “What is this?” It was literally (and I mean it this time) unlike anything I have ever seen. 

Afterwards, in our conversation with Debbie McMahon, the delightful and supremely talented creator/director of Absinthe and founder of the Grand Guignolers, I told her, in awe, “I think you’ve created a new genre!” With her legs tucked under her and a sly smile on her face, her eyes twinkled, “That’s the hope!” 

I wasn’t being facetious, either. After that moment in the audience, by the time we had our conversation with Debbie, I had made up my mind. She had succeeded. With the help of a great ensemble and incredible stories, this group of people fused interpretive dance, commedia del arte, raunchy finger puppets and kitschy horror into something that somehow not only worked but was insanely entertaining and provocative. 

I had just finished this semester a few days ago at LMU. One of the classes I enjoyed thoroughly was Theatre History in which we read the drama and studied culture from Ancient Greece to 17th century French neoclassicism. One thing innately visible in any field of history is that life repeats itself, cyclically, eternally, unceasingly. When applied to art, this notion makes us realize it is close to impossible to create something that has not been done before in some form. 

So what are our options, then? In the history of theatre we can see art coming from revivals of the past that meld, borrow, steal and reinvent theatre works of greatness. This is the reason we can still put up adaptations and make them applicable to modern day. 

Environments and people may change over time but fears, worries, issues and the most basic of emotions remain the same. So why not take an adaptation one step further and pull from whatever you’d like in order to create something that has literally never been done before? And in some sort of hyper-speed, drugged-out fantastic version of this comes the gloriousness of Absinthe, Opium and Magic. Don’t miss it.