At 4:30 p.m., Carlos Murillo will present a lecture and reading surrounding his work in progress titled A Thick Description of Harry Smith. This portable medicine show with live music explores the life and times of avant-garde filmmaker, painter, musicologist, anthropologist, occultist, collector, and fabulist, Harry Everett Smith
The performance is envisioned as a raucous, theatrical equivalent of a Rauscheberg assemblage that both celebrates and questions the notion of authenticity in America. Murillo will create a portable performance that, like Smith, can easily move across different contexts – a piece that is equally at home in a juke joint in Mississippi as in an European opera house.
Exploding conventional notions of theatrical biography, Thick Description is conceived as a proto-psychedelic medicine show. Performed by eight actor-musicians, the piece features contemporary adaptations of folk songs from the Anthology of American Folk Music compiled by Smith; radio drama vignettes that hopscotch across real and speculative episodes from Smith’s life; visitations from Allen Ginsberg, Richard Nixon, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Dr. Wilder Penfield; campfire storytelling; cabinets of wonder; and Foley work. An assemblage of the detritus of American culture, the piece is a quest for American identity from the perspective of a denizen of the Underground.
About Harry Everett Smith
Smith, best known for compiling the Anthology of American Folk Music, lived an eccentric life invisible to most Americans. Yet, his alchemical endeavors revealed a web of connections across a wild terrain of human knowledge, and reshaped popular culture as we know it. Trucking with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Taylor, Moses Asch, Lionel Ziprin, Jonas Mekas, and Henry Phipps, Smith fluidly crossed disciplinary, aesthetic, and social boundaries. The alchemical nature of his work, the tension between his relative anonymity, his influence, and the ambiguity of his character (Leonardo-esque genius? trickster? charlatan?), lies at the core of Thick Description.
About Carlos Murillo
Carlos Murillo is an internationally produced playwright. The European premiere of his play A Human Interst Story recently opened at Theatre der Stadt Aalen in Germany, where his dark play is also running in its second year in rep. His work has been seen at the Vigszinhaz in Budapest, the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the NYC Summer Play Festival, En Garde Arts, Theatre @ Boston Court in LA, the Sundance Institute and at many theatres across the United States. He is currently writing commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and Playwrights Horizons in NY. As a director he has staged many of his own works as well as plays by Jason Grote, Julia Cho and Rogelio Martinez. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and Chicago Dramatists. He lives in Chicago where he heads the playwriting program at The Theatre School of DePaul University.
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