An Evening with Professor Enki

2010
Collaborative dinner theater

The premise of the An Evening with Professor Enki was to explore the relationship between memory and consciousness.  It is a story of love, loss, and the collective insanity that gripped the world during the atomic era of the mid-20th century. Enki is structured as a hybrid play and vaudeville show with an overarching narrative and a series of embedded skits that reflect and comment upon the central story. It engages the audience by integrating the reason for their being there–seeing a show and having a nice dinner–into the story that unfolds throughout the night.

The audience entered a bubbling laboratory, rich with history before our time, as wandering scientists of questionable origin stop to observe the local inhabitants. Whether they wanted to or not, the audience became participants and were forced into playing along by the environment surrounding them; in turn this allowed the audience to become collaborators in creating the world in which they were immersed. It was intentionally unsettling, a combination laboratory, alchemical lab, and old-fashioned sanitarium. They were barraged by audio and video including dual projection screens and an eight-point sound system mixed with the goal of creating an atmosphere that bounced from comedy to the most serious topics of the nuclear age. The people they met there did not make them feel better either: There was an entire group of characters who were there strictly to enhance this feeling of discomfort. Throughout the evening, observers watched the audience as a group of silent record keepers who took note of everything they eat, drink, and say. The confounding atmosphere continued until the very end of the evening, when the show concluded by leaving the audience in darkness.