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Kevin returned to the great Northwest just in time to land a job working for this new online bookstore, right in the iridescent midst of the great dot-com bubble. In addition to helping launch a website from an office park somewhere in Slough, England, Kevin worked as a customer service representative, trainer and marketing manager organizing promotional auctions, including one that involved producers from the Oprah Winfrey show yelling at him on the phone every day for several hours.

Around this time, Kevin began studying movement and theater methods at the Freehold Studio Lab and performed in several small Seattle fringe productions. He also toured elementary schools performing stories written by students as a member of the Imaginators.

Kevin eventually left his day job working at Amazon to pursue theater and acting full-time which led him back to France, where in addition to ingesting lots of stinky cheese and wine, he trained at the inimitable Lecoq school.

In France, he co-created the absurdly fun Mad Maths (over 500 performances and counting!) and is the co-founder of the theater company Sous un autre Angle, under whose auspices he also produced and performed in the award winning Brementown for the Avingon festival.

In New York, Kevin is proud to be a company member of The Nerve Tank and a co-founder of the Gold No Trade theater company with whom he helped create Floating Brothel.

Recently Kevin decided to go back to school to become a health care provider (just like his dear old dad). He is now a registered nurse working at Lenox Hill Hospital and is continuing his studies at Columbia University to obtain his advanced degree as a nurse practitioner.

Kevin has traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia and currently hangs his hat in Brooklyn, NY with his beautiful bride Debbie.

“Watch as everyday objects, take life and lead you into their fantastical world.”

“A joy for all ages, mixing the magic of fairytales with the dynamic world of found-object puppetry.”

Created by: Megan Campisi, Kevin Lapin, Caroline Reck, Elisa Matula and Adrian Gillot. Original music by Thomas Merlan.

The Production
Brementown an adaptation of Grimm’s Bremen-Town Musicians was originally produced in France for the Avignon Festival by the company Sous un autre Angle and received awards from both the ADAMI and ALFA organizations.

Brementown is an adult and children’s paradise (for ages 7 to 77) which combines the magic of fairytales with the dynamic synergy of sound, shadow and object puppetry.

The story starts with a normal living room where the everyday objects we know so well transform into the characters of the story: a bellows becomes the head of an out-of-breath and aging donkey and the old tomes from the library shelf create a tall-tale-telling rooster literally filled with stories… The wonder and magic of the performance style will please the young while the deeper human themes  will engage the more mature. Brementown leaves text behind and lets the virtuosity of the puppets tell the story for themselves, creating a true theater experience.

The Story
In Brementown the magic and metaphors of the original Grimm’s fairytale are just the beginning. The classic themes of the original story, getting old and the value of idealism find new relevance in the trials of our endearing hero: an arthritic donkey -who loves and trusts his owner- but who is too old to earn his keep. When he catches wind that he’s outlived his usefulness he takes to the road to avoid ending up in an Alpo can. He’s soon joined by a septuagenarian cat who would prefer a nice pension and some sleep to chasing mice and the trio is completed by a fearful rooster who can read his fate in the cookbooks that compose his own body.

With this ominous beginning, the cast of innocent-but-aged hopefuls embark on the dark road to Brementown. But don’t worry, they’ve got a plan: they’re forming a band and are sure that fame and fortune await them as musicians in the big city.

Brementown
When the brothers Grimm collected oral tales and set them down in print, they simplified the stories and recast them into morality tales to meet their didactic ends. Bremen-Town Musicians retained more the character of the original oral tales: the story doesn’t have a prescriptive- moral framework that serves as a reference point for the characters and their actions. There is no young Jack learning the ways of the world or Little Red Riding Hood getting a lesson in obeying her elders. Our protagonists aren’t young. They do undergo trials and they do win the day, but it is in spite of themselves. So what is the lesson? With our production it’s not about what happens if you’re good or bad, but how to negotiate morally ambiguous lives –an inquiry with modern relevance.

Found-object Puppetry
The original story, like most fairytales, works with layers of meaning. The performance style therefore needed to reflect this, and object-puppetry does just that. Since the puppets are everyday items that we know and relate to, they are loaded with associations and cultural significance. The object chosen for a given character thus informs how we see that character: a cat made from a woman’s handbag and all its contents will evoke at times the panacea of mom’s purse, and then the vanity and mask of make-up and still later a woman’s intimacy and secrets.

Object puppetry takes the audience beyond the mundane through the mundane. On so many levels it is engaging. The constellation of objects that create each character are not physically held together like traditional marionettes: there is negative space between body parts. The audience instinctively fills in the gaps thus provoking the imagination and allowing the audience to participate in the creation of each character. In the same way, we tell the story, less in words than in action, image and sound. The audience is once again invited to take part, putting the images together and unfolding the story for themselves.

Puppets often require more than one puppeteer to manipulate them. Creating character movements that are fluid and natural is a question of group precision, coordination and collective intuition. Also, the relation between performer and audience adds another layer of energy. Present at all times alongside the puppet, the puppeteer is completely visible, and yet not the focus. Performing becomes an exploration of the shadowy space between object and character, actor and audience, creating a new relationship, mediated by puppets.

A wacky, absurd and lyrical presentation on that most hilarious of subjects: mathematics!

A show for the math traumatized, flunk-outs and fanatics…

Write what you know… In creating Mad Math (Mad Maths in the original French), that is exactly what we did. It was almost a challenge: could we make real theater that is really about math? That is to say not a play where the main character happens to be a mathematician, and not a lesson plan hiding behind a red nose and big shoes, but a play that actually talks about math in an exciting and accessible way to anyone from 9-99 years old. An impossible challenge? Well, it seemed like a good one to the two of us, fresh out of theater school and living in Paris, an American (me) who liked to read physics books in his spare time and a Frenchmen (Olivier Faliez) with a masters in math…

Return to math… To create a play about math means to a certain extent creating a mathematical play, which is to say a play that is scientifically precise. So we started with a good dose of research and review, hitting the books to be sure that everything we said would be mathematically accurate. This also helped us remember what it was like to be students again. Evoking the subject of math, equates to evoking memories, sometimes good but more often bad, of high-school math classes. Though one of our goals was to show people that math isn’t just a subject that you are forced to take in school, these tedious—even tortuous—memories are ultimately and unavoidably what we all have in common with math, and therefore the perfect starting place for the play. The trick would then be to bring the audience back to this familiar territory and then quickly (before the traumatic flashbacks set in) whisk them away to new and unexpected mathematical terrain. So our play would be set up like a class or lecture, but how to surprise you with math’s hidden treasures of mystery, absurdity and humor?

Stick with math… Big words and ideas for a silly little play about math, right? But that’s it, math is hard. It demands a certain rigor and precision, and the temptation, for us as much as any student, is to avoid the issues, skirt around the topics and never get beyond the obvious parodies of math nerds (not that Mr. X and Mr. Y don’t wear glasses and enjoy a good round of triple- integration now and again!). “Mad Math” would also not be about finding real world applications of math, though laudable and even interesting, we wanted to stay close to the theoretical and occult aspects of the science. A television screen or field trip are better suited vehicles for discovering the wonders and math behind skyscrapers and pyramids. The stage and theater are just the place to find the magic and poetry in math, what’s hidden on the inside, or behind, that complicated formula. One has to look back on the time when math, science and meta-physics were all considered to be aspects of the same thing, the study of the meaning and the inner workings of life. These were truly religious questions, questions of life and death. Now those are dramatic stakes.

Talk math… How then to truly talk about math without losing either the theater or our audience? If we start by going back in time and understanding man (and woman’s) desperate need for reliable systems of -counting, measuring and calculating we’ve already begun to humanize the subject. Now if we imagine how the world would be different if we used different math to describe it, we are involved in a creative process. Finally, if we push these ideas to the extreme, turn them on their head and even transpose them a little, things will really get interesting. Where the theories and concepts touch on the absurd, where there are ambiguities, that’s where there the humor, humanity and, yes, even poetry is to be found in math… Suddenly, we find ourselves on familiar territory again, not that of the fastidious algebra lesson, but that of language, describing the world around us and- trying to understand why it’s the way it is and our place in it, questions which are at once essentially the territory of theater and mathematics. QED.

Such were our thoughts in creating Mad Math and we hope that for about an hour (that is about the length of a class period), you will be able to share our fascination and pleasure in the world of mathematics…

Visit the French website at www.madmaths.fr.

Adapted from historical accounts, Transport Beyond the Seas follows three of these women—a down-on-her luck country girl, a thirteen-year old prostitute and a high-class con artist—on their harrowing year-long voyage from the underbelly of London to the underside of the world.

Performed by five actors on a 3 x 6 platform, the epic tale unfolds in a radically reduced space that functions as a camera lens, enabling cinematic shifts in time, scale and location. Through the course of an hour, using only their bodies and a handful of props, the ensemble creates myriad characters and locales, transforming the raw platform into the bustle of London, the din of the courtroom, the dank bilge of the ship, and the rolling expanse of the ocean.

Created by Megan Campisi, Loren Fenton, Kevin Lapin, Liz Vacco and Ben Vershbow

For more information visit www.floatingbrothel.com

 

info@kevinlapin.com

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718.408.0279

 

 

“May the road rise up to meet you and may the wind be always at your back.”