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Created and performed by Nancy Donoval and Gerald Fierst “Nobody pays attention to how heroic the struggles of everyday
life are--MOUTH was a celebration of those simple struggles.” |
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Everyone is in the middle of their life’s journey and every day the story changes, sometimes just a little and sometimes a whole lot. MOUTH is a creative response, a mirror to that constant changeability of life. Story artists Nancy Donoval and Gerald Fierst combine the best elements of theater, improvisation and storytelling to create a new form of performance that is exquisite in its simplicity and outrageous in its complexity. The form is constant, the content changes with every show. Every show asks the question, “So, what’s the news?” The news is what drives MOUTH. What’s the news in the papers, websites, the community, the world around us? What’s the news in our lives, the seemingly ordinary minutia of an individual life? What do those two very different kinds of news have to do with each other? Each show begins with the current headlines from the commercial press--local newspapers, the New York Times, national magazines, and tabloids such as the Sun and the World Weekly News. Themes emerge that will resurface as the show progresses into archetypal stories from world folklore. Here the modern collective mind of the media rubs up against the ancient collective memory of myth and legend to see what they have in common. The ancient memory of the collective gives way to the ancient memory of the individual with early childhood memories. We have shrieked with glee at the monsters who chase us from our earliest days. Which brings us to the news of the individual--the performers’ private lives, the anecdotal everyday ordinary stuff of life yields the monsters that are being faced that week. Of course some things in life don’t change, and it is no surprise that every performance of MOUTH eventually deals in some way with the universal constants of love, death and family. Nancy Donoval and Gerald Fierst, two of America’s premier story artists, make an irresistible couple. Long-time friends in real life, in MOUTH they open that friendship up to the audience by sharing their hopes, fears, dreams, families and loves with an intimacy that is at once remarkable and intriguing-loaded with humor and deeply rooted in humanity. Jazz is the best analogy for the way MOUTH works, playing improvisational variations on core images and themes. MOUTH is a unique cabaret theater evening that follows the heroic journey of the common life through laughter and tears and into the recognition that all stories ultimately are the same: the pursuit of love, the dream of riches, and the inevitability of death. Producer reviews from recent MOUTH performances
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Gerald
Fierst |
Nancy
Donoval |
| began his theatrical career at Yale and went on to perform in the streets of New York as a member of the celebrated New York Free Theater and to dance with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. He has toured solo shows to universities and art centers throughout the US and has often been featured at New York City's 92nd St. Y as one of America's best-known Jewish Storytellers. He was cofounder with Olympia Dukakis of the Whole Theater in New Jersey |
was director of the Wild Onion Storytelling Festival in Chicago from 1989 to 1998. As a performer her venues include the Two Chairs Telling series at the Jungle theater in Minneapolis, the New York City Storytelling Center, the Chicago Fringe Festival and the 20th anniversary WisCon feminist science fiction convention. Nancy is a founding member of the collaborative performance group, Mothers and Other Wild Women, and also plies her trade as a presentation coach in the corporate world. |
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