TBA:19 Partner Programs

Partner Program

Curated by Dena Beard and Hope Svenson

On Sept. 14, Yale Union will premiere The Dope Elf, a comedic play and performance environment about housing, power, and magic. Commissioned by LA-based playwright Asher Hartman, the project will transform YU into a makeshift mobile home park inhabited for four weeks by Hartman’s company, Gawdafful National Theater.

In the play, an aging transman psychopomp fears losing his power as his life and the lives of his community teeter against the demands of urban life, which are increasingly stark. The play’s structure includes a meta-play (the actors living in the gallery performing as townspeople); a multi-part scripted play to be performed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights; and everything caught on 24/7 surveillance video live-streamed to the YU website.

Caught up in the whirlwind of The Dope Elf’s multitude of voices, sensorial phenomena, and slippery points-of-view, the “play” becomes a space to experience aching laughter and psychic pain. Characters like John, Little Man, and Saxobeat, a mangy wolf dog, overlap and inhabit one another, evading fixed identity by switching between a multiplicity of characterizations. This unboundedness is felt in the language which, at times poetically and at times naturalistically, contradicts or evades the action. Refusing easy categorization or interpretation, Hartman’s projects slip between the realms of visual art, theater, film, and mysticism.

Reservations at Yale Union Website

ABOUT THE ARTIST

(Playwright and Director) Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work centers on the exploration of self through Western histories and ideologies. He is the founder and chief beneficiary of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written since 2010. He is also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), who teach intuition-building to artists, activists, and interested others. Recent theatrical works include “Lost Privilege Company” in “Archive Fever: Lost Words, Buried Voices” as part of USC’s Visions and Voices series and Pieter Performance Space (2018); “Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge” at Machine Project, LA (2017); “Mr. Akita,” Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, (2017) and at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2017); the Tang Museum, New York (2015) “The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance,” LACMA (2016).