Listen to an excerpt of Alamo or visit the website on Monday for the full version.
The play revolves around an existing work of contemporary art, Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo (known to New Yorkers as “the cube”), which sits on a traffic island in Astor Place in downtown Manhattan. Irving Paley, a middle-aged doctoral candidate in English, is obsessed with the cube and the ways in which it affects those who pass by it. On an answering machine (“Call 1-900-555-CUBE”), he collects the voices of cab drivers, students, drug dealers and conspiracy theorists, all of whom find some sort of meaning in the cube.
The cast features Scott Shepard as radio producer Doug Haines; John Hadden as doctoral candidate Irving Paley; Tirlok Malik as a taxi driver; Miranda July as a Midwestern college student; James Harry as a conspiracy theorist, Larry Pine as artist Tony Rosenthal, Ethan Hawke as a purveyor of federally scheduled substances, and Diane Salinger as an art historian. Alamo’s actors were recorded on location, in cafes, on street corners and answering machines all over New York.
The play was written by Rick Moody and produced by Bruce Odland for The Next Big Thing. A print version was published in The Paris Review, Summer 2002, #162.
The play revolves around an existing work of contemporary art, Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo (known to New Yorkers as “the cube”), which sits on a traffic island in Astor Place in downtown Manhattan. Irving Paley, a middle-aged doctoral candidate in English, is obsessed with the cube and the ways in which it affects those who pass by it. On an answering machine (“Call 1-900-555-CUBE”), he collects the voices of cab drivers, students, drug dealers and conspiracy theorists, all of whom find some sort of meaning in the cube.
The cast features Scott Shepard as radio producer Doug Haines; John Hadden as doctoral candidate Irving Paley; Tirlok Malik as a taxi driver; Miranda July as a Midwestern college student; James Harry as a conspiracy theorist, Larry Pine as artist Tony Rosenthal, Ethan Hawke as a purveyor of federally scheduled substances, and Diane Salinger as an art historian. Alamo’s actors were recorded on location, in cafes, on street corners and answering machines all over New York.
The play was written by Rick Moody and produced by Bruce Odland for The Next Big Thing. A print version was published in The Paris Review, Summer 2002, #162.
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