#PickoftheWeek | Experience ‘Five Oceans in a Teaspoon’ in Flushing
BY QEDC It's In Queens
It’s a performance-reading-conversation featuring speakers, musicians, actors, animation, and projections.
Some call it “viz-lit.”
Dennis J. Bernstein and Warren Lehrer present a stage version of “Five Oceans in a Teaspoon” at Flushing Town Hall on Friday, Nov. 15, at 7 pm.
The show is based on the eponymous memoir of short visual poems by Bernstein, a California-based investigative journalist, and Lehrer, a Sunnyside artist known for creating highly visual books and multi-media projects.
Viz-lit goes live.
Judith Sloan, a prolific actress, playwright, and sound artist, will join them on stage. (She recently debuted “It Can Happen Here: Episode One,” a dramatic comedy with a similar mix of dancing, spoken word, and open discussion, at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center.) The other scheduled performers include composer-violist Andrew Griffin, soprano Alicia Waller, composer-pianist Dominic Frigo, and vocalist-actor Emily Wexler.
Frigo composed music for four of the poems in “Five Oceans in a Teaspoon,” turning them into song. Griffin, who is currently on Broadway in “Ain’t Too Proud,” composed and recorded the animation soundtracks.
Tickets are $5, but students and teenagers with proper identification can attend for free.
Divided into eight chapters, the “Five Oceans in a Teaspoon” memoir contains about 300 pages of visual-verbal graphics. Bernstein’s text describes his life, including his dyslexia, family violence, the Radical 1960s, and even his mother’s dementia. Lehrer’s expressive typography makes the words explode. Some letters are repeated, some are amplified, others appear to dance across the pages.
The book is actually a third collaboration for Bernstein and Lehrer. In 1984, they produced “French Fries,” a play about a murder in a fast-food restaurant. They created “Grrrhhhh: A Study of Social Patterns,” in 1987.
Flushing Town Hall is located at 137-35 Northern Blvd.
Images: Warren Lehrer/Flushing Town Hall
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