Gob Squad, Berlin’s outlandish theater renegades, set their sights on Tolstoy’s opus War and Peace, only to discover that neither war nor peace are coming without a fight.
The setting is a literary salon, where audience members join the cast in a live theater/video performance in which art and daily life, history and the present, reality and fiction blur. In this American premiere, a never-ending parade of characters dance, dine and duel while performers prepare for scenes as if going into battle, all in order to reframe Tolstoy’s central inquiry: Can we live a moral life in an imperfect world?
Gob Squad make live video performances that unsettle the lines between the prepared and the improvised, performer and bystander, fiction and life. Gob Squad has been devising, directing and performing together since 1994, motivated by a desire to elevate the everyday and empower audience members to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators.
