Nature Theater of Oklahoma No Dice

Avoid the hex of the unbeliever!

See both these shows by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an exciting young performance group based in New York and directed by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Their name comes from a line in their inspiration, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, and their creative stagecraft transforms ready-made materials and found dialogue into revelatory DIY theater.

With No Dice, you’ll come for the magic and stay for the ham sandwiches. An epic of the everyday, it’s a relatively short, 4-hour distillation of a quasi-legendary melodramatic spectacle originally 11 hours long. Using a text drawn from over 100 hours of the company’s recorded telephone conversations, the actors filter the seemingly mundane through the conventions of amateur dinner theater—and bring it all home with surprising and rewarding cohesion by the evening’s end. A critic for Portland’s Oregonian notes: “While the performance style is exaggerated, often downright goofy, there's a precision of diction, movement, expression and timing that puts them leagues ahead.…Nature Theater knows how to inspire a willing suspension of linearity.”

This event made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Performance Residency Program. Major contributors of the National Performance Network include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. For more information: npn.org.