Boney Manilli
Written and directed by Edgar Arceneaux
OCT 5-7 2023 @REDCAT in partnership with CAP UCLA
Boney Manilli is supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Boney Manilli is a dark musical comedy in the shape of a pop music video, a puppet show, and a burial ceremony. Actor Alex Barlas plays “Edgar,” a visual artist overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and self-loathing, who is unable to complete his play on the infamous pop music duo, Milli Vanilli. His freeloading brother, Bro Bro, decides to adapt Disney’s Song of the South into his own play about Black liberation, while their mother, Momma, a failed pop singer, is slowly fading away with dementia. Their lives spin from pathetic to bizarre, becoming strangely intertwined as each one’s search for truth collides with the other’s.
Credits:
Written and directed by Edgar Arceneaux
Original music: Edgar Arceneaux, in collaboration with Nick Goldston, Everette Saunders and Kirby
Cast: Alex Barlas, Efé, Terry Wayne Jr.
Dramaturg: Douglas Kearney
Producers: Ratri Anindyajati and Rarara!
Production Manager: Xiaoyue Zhang
Assistant Production Manager: Gefei Liu
Stage Manager: Macy E. Kunke
Lighting designer: Omar Madkour
Costume designer: Loren Weldon
Scenic and Props designer: Yuki Ding
Puppet Master: Miguel Ayala
Video designer:Kamyi Lee
Sound designer: John Zalewski
Photos by Angel Origgi
Development phase
2021-2022 writing and developmental residencies supported by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) and Vielmetter Los Angeles
B&W photos as dramaturgical tools by Xiaoyue Zhang
A note on the process:
One great joy of working with an interdisciplinary artist is that all tools are on the table when it comes to channeling and capturing the brilliance in the rehearsal room. For lack of a pre-defined term, what I was doing with Edgar was somewhere between a dramaturg, assistant director, and a photographer, or perhaps all of those. Being able to observe the room, design, facilitate, and lead structured improvisational exercises that developed over the course of rehearsals to excavate group and character dynamics, and then intuitively respond to and intentionally frame specific moments - which I'd like to try calling "energetic architecture" - through the lens of a camera, while Edgar was deepening and complicating character and spacial relationships in the script, we found these two processes came together with serendipity.
It was finding dramaturgical precision without the need for linguistical accuracy.