Plucked from the tradition of the medieval storytelling bard, MANO A MANO is an operatic monodrama about toxic masculinity, needling Anglo-Saxon epics with personal anecdote, pseudo-history, Antonio Banderas movies, tangents about the Romans, boxing and stories about New Jersey.
Writer/performer Paul Pinto embodies all the characters across a five-octave range of timbres: sweet, throaty and viscerally guttural. Posing the question “what if Sir Gawain and Beowulf were fighting over killing the same dragon?” he answers with ninety minutes of virtuosic chants, rants, song and spectacle, as he bobs and weaves between passages of puckishly quick verbiage and aching melancholia. Director Kristin Marting stages it in the round with the audience immersed in the action, surrounded by a mix of wild saxophone and percussion improvisation.
