Tag Archives: Program Note

Mundo Overloadus

By Michael Lederer

I am writ­ing this on the first day of a new year that arrived not a nanosec­ond too soon. We need­ed a new year as sore­ly as we ever have.

2020 will take its infa­mous place in his­to­ry, a time Queen Eliz­a­beth II once charm­ing­ly – if woe­ful­ly – dubbed an annus hor­ri­bilis. We have to be care­ful not to mis­spell that, though giv­en as hard as these last twelve months have been, it’s tempting.

Segue­ing from the Queen’s real Latin to my own faux Latin, exact­ly ten years ear­li­er, in 2010, my play Mun­do Over­load­us pre­miered in New York’s East Vil­lage. The title was my stab at describ­ing what seemed already a world over­loaded. That play is my absur­dist take on a sug­ary sweet Amer­i­can cul­tur­al land­mark, the sil­ly and now for­ev­er-rerun TV com­e­dy from the 60s, Gilligan’s Island – my ver­sion set in an insane asy­lum. In my play, I was ask­ing the audi­ence if the unapolo­getic inno­cence of that show still had cur­ren­cy in this new, already cyn­i­cal cen­tu­ry. From 9/11 in 2001 to the coro­na virus lurk­ing about rough­ly 20 years lat­er, it feels that – for sanity’s sake – we des­per­ate­ly need a gen­tler, kinder point of view, even if it’s the cot­ton can­dy of a sitcom.

Bob Den­ver as Gilligan

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