On Wednesday 2 March 2011, Theater TAS‘ The Last Story, a play by Kaća Čelan, opens at HERE for a two-week run that ends on Saturday 12 March. The play, described by the company as “a postmodern European version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” is a two-character “duodrama, a war of conversations, exploding phrases filled with emotions strong like gunpowder. … ‘A verbal therapy’ with and against each other, a striking parable of the battle of the sexes develops; its intensity equals a mirror, in which the audience watches itself through the protagonists, ‘the last Adam and Eve,’ who, like a lion and lioness, are caught in the cage called marriage.” The play is directed by its author and stars Tajna Tanović (who created the role at a workshop production of The Last Story at The Tank last year) and Scott Wallace. Tickets are available through the HERE Web site.

Theater TAS is an unusual company, founded in Sarajevo by Kaća Čelan in 1984. The company moved from Bosnia to Germany in 1993, where it specialized in Austrian-tinged cabaret, Shakespeare and children’s theatre (and where the German original of The Last Story premiered in 1995). Among their productions in Germany were several plays by Shakespeare and work by Samuel  Beckett, Peter Handke and Frank Wedekind. They are relatively new to America; their first production, Yard Sale: New Footfalls, was a reinterpretation of Beckett’s classic late work for chashama in 2009, also featuring Ms. Tanović.

The Last Story is the first extended production of Theater TAS in New York. Color me intrigued. More information at HERE.

Images:
Top: Graphic design by Mirko Ilić Corp.
Bottom: Tajna Tanović in The Last Story. Photo courtesy Theater TAS