(Pixababy)
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drew a card from the tarot deck on the altar. I don’t know much about tarot, but I knew enough to recognize my card: Death, a skeletal figure wielding a long scythe atop a gaunt horse. I’d been marked for Death before even entering the space, and I couldn’t wait to see what that would mean for the rest of my night.
The Tarot Reading is the brainchild of local theater artists Alan Katz and Quill Nebeker, an occult twist on the Chicago Neo-Futurists’ Two Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (embroiled in a controversy that our sister site Chicagoist wrote about here). Their aim was to use the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot to create theatrical “readings” related to each card and performed one at a time by “mediums” for 21 audience members who each would draw one before the performance.
In just under eight months, they had it ready for a well-timed premiere: Halloween. After a sold-out weekend of performances and a few more months of incubation, the duo is bringing the show back for another round.
The Halloween iteration took place at Studio 1469, a lonely space mostly hidden from the street by a long alleyway. In the lobby, audience members were instructed one by one to “sacrifice something of value” (sentimental or otherwise, including cash) before drawing their card, and were led from there into a bare concrete basement with a pentagram painted over the performance area and several red-cloth covered tables set with homemade bread and red wine. It invoked a sort of tongue-in-cheek cult initiation, a perfect balance of campy indulgence and the genuine creepiness that Tarot invokes.
From there, the MC (Rebecca Speas as the “Invoker”) drew the first card, brought the audience member who drew it to sit in a chair at the center of the pentagram and the appropriate medium launched into their reading performance.
To spoil anything further would tarnish the magic of the show, but the pieces spanned a wide length of tones and disciplines from poetry readings to dance pieces to absurd party games and a few that defied easy categorization. Each medium in the group (which included a yogi and slam poet) brought a unique set of skills to the proceedings, and as more of the cards were read, their individual voices came through clearly without the need for any traditional character building.
Those voices were key to the construction of the show the first time around, but their modularity is also key to the show’s long-term goals. For the second iteration, only three of the original mediums will be returning, with four new performers added to the mix (including a burlesque roller derby star and Nebeker himself). Every one of the readings has been re-written from scratch, and the venue has shifted from the concrete Halloween bunker to a more traditional bar setting (the Evening Star in Alexandria). Updates also include a “Minor Arcana” ticket for those who wish only to observe and greater emphasis on the more interactive and playful offerings of the Halloween performance.
Plenty of experimental shows say that you’ll never see the same performance twice, but it’s rare that one can make an honest claim to being a completely different piece of art from one performance to another. Katz and Nebeker’s formula brings some real novelty to the DC theater scene, and with a little bit of support, attention and tolerance for it only sprouting up every few months, it could be one of the city’s more unique offerings to the greater theatrical conversation.
The Tarot Reading runs from March 26-28 at #9 Lounge at Evening Star Cafe, 2000 Mt Vernon Avenue Alexandria, VA. Buy tickets here. Follow The Tarot Reading on Facebook for updates on their next performance.
