By: W. David Hancock Performed by: Fisher Neal
The Race of The Ark Tattoo is a lecture, a game, a ghost story, a personal American history, a seance, an autopsy of white male poverty, a ritual invested in putting the dead to rest but only after first waking them up. And it's a flea market the size of a folding table populated only with cast off objects from the collection of forgotten outsider artist Homer P. Phinney. With seeming trash, epic feats of intimate storytelling, and one teller at the center lost inside a tragicomic purgatory - Race is a dangerous bargain; one might remember something they'd hoped to forget, might get a little too close to someone radically different from them, might laugh while another is holding back sadness, might remember what's possible in the simple act of being together and bearing witness and then realize how rarely it happens.
The Race of the Ark Tattoo also an Obie award winning play by W. David Handcock which performed in the late 90s for months and months in the gallery space at the old PS122, before playing parking garages and rehearsal studios across the country - as a kind of mysterious growth on the side of a LORT theater. Hancock himself first performed the play out of the trunk of his car parked by the ocean.
This revival of Ark is performed by Fisher Neal, and co-created by Sunder Ganglani, Fisher Neal, and Kristen Robinson. The creators came together for no other reason but to remember what theater is and can be in its most essential and intimate state; Homer holding court at a fire, ghost stories on the Greek’s terms, séance, laughter, language. They wanted to remember what it felt like to be held in the tight grip of a great text and confounded by the sudden intimacy that’s possible in the mercurial presence of a difficult performance.