Opening June 23, 2007
Tickets on Sale Now

Doppelganger is about two people who strive for material happiness, believing that superficial pursuits can bring personal satisfaction. After a life-changing event they must adapt and realize that their pleasure pursuits are only a single, small element of living, compared to the grand scope of the universe. For true fulfillment they must take a risk that contradicts popular logic and personal inhibitions to achieve a lasting understanding of happiness and the world. At its heart, Doppelganger is the simple story of a network engineer, George, and a human resources executive, Marcia, coming to terms with the death of their mutual acquaintance, Frank. Heath complicates this by creating a double world. Frank dies by falling to his death while joking with George, but simultaneously, the same Frank is having an affair in the office across the street with Marcia. Time and Space play tricks on the two protagonists, haunting, perplexing and tempting them to open up its mysteries and come to an understanding of Frank's death and their own existence.

Heath's theory of Time and Space, coupled with Bocchieri's physical realization of that theory, is what creates the dualities and drives the action of the play. The theory of time presented in Doppelganger is the following: Time splits in two when we're born. It remains in separate streams, outside of our perception, until the horizon of death approaches. As death approaches, the two strains are pulled together until they collapse in on each other. Like a black hole, at the moment of death, these two strains of time collapse in on themselves, creating a moment when infinity, and the realization of eternity occurs, in a unified, unending moment. George and Marcia, in their own ways, must come to understand this moment in order to find fulfillment.

Bocchieri creates the illusion of these multiple and simultaneously existing worlds onstage through the use of video and video projection, including live playback. The two protagonists are not only forced to deal with the death of someone near to them psychologically, but also with what it means to be living in, both spatially and metaphorically, in two worlds at once.

We will use Doppelganger as the lens to focus our technological explorations and experiments. We are particularly interested in real time media and sound design, the ability to explore a cognitive dislocation for the audience and in using a clear and delineated media over-saturation of the performance space with the text, allowing the media and sound design to act simultaneously as antagonist and narrator. The focus of the experimentation would be to personify the psychological doppelgangers that haunt the protagonists by using video and sound. We will explore the technical aspects in a variety of ways to create this effect. Besides using prerecorded footage, the focus of the projections is to use strategically placed cameras and allow the live feed to provide insight to the psychoses of the different characters. Also, we would like to explore motion-capturing software to add another layer to this effect and intensify the microscope.