THE PIRANHA LOUNGE
Photo Fernando Barbera
THE PIRANHA LOUNGE premiered at the Oval House Theatre in December 2002. The show returned for another sell-out run at the Oval receiving a Time Out Critic's Choice review. The play transforms a small theatre studio into a seedy late-night club where the audience, sitting at dimly lit tables, meets the strange members of this late-night shebeen - horny Kangaroos, ex-magicians, sadists, the living dead and many others.
Meet Og - he’s a man who just loves too much and can’t stop giving his beloved wife Barbara everything she asks for. Meet Petunia - or perhaps you’d rather not, given her penchant for double-dealing card counting and sideline in sadism. Meet Barbosa - a horny teenage kangaroo who dreams of Baccara...
Their stories are told using an enormous range of theatre techniques. Be prepared to be surprised by the minute, laugh and be touched by the melancholia of the Lounge. Based on the stories of Murilo Rubiao, the first Brazilian Magical Realist writer, the Piranha Lounge is a place where dreams are waiting to come true.
"Insanely Magical" Time Out Critic’s Choice
MURILO RUBIÃO
Rubião, the first Brazilian writer of the style commonly known as Magical Realism, wrote and re-wrote the same short stories during all his life (1916-1991). They deal with the real and the unreal – animals, dragons, human beings alive and dead appear and disappear, talk, touch and exist in an almost casual yet fantastic realism. Kafkaesque, one might say of these stories, but they belong to another tradition of fantastic literature – a South American one. The element that most clearly separates him from his counterpart from Prague is a gently pervasive, unmasked sensuality.
During three months the company was immersed in the work of Rubião. Several of his stories were read and adapted. Six remain in the final version of the show: The Moon, The Three Names of Godofredo, The Dragons, The Trap, Teleco – The Rabbit & Barbara. Characters and names are based in Rubião’s characters even if their stories are not told in the show.
Murilo Rubião has one book translated in English – The Ex-Magician and Other Stories, published by Harper & Row.
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