QFWFQ (in LA)

QFWFQ is loosely based on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. A labyrinthine, surrealist journey that touches on the politics of gender, music, international relations and storytelling itself, QFWFQ is a show that never begins nor ends. You’re confused. So are we.

Directed by Hannah Pilkes and structurally adapted from the Italo Calvino novel If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, as well as other Calvino works, QFWFQ is a solo performance without a fourth wall. Taking its nonsensical title from the name of Calvino’s ageless, timeless main character of the bulk of the collection The Cosmicomics, QFWFQ is an adaptation of themes and structure, in a similar manner that Charlie Kaufman once adapted the non-fiction The Orchid Thief into Adaptation. In place of much of the hard plot points of Calvino’s novel, QFWFQ thematically links stories from the performer’s life, all of which deal with questions of political and artistic permission. Touching on architectural marvels, improvised jazz concertos, gender identity, suicide, reckoning with Zionism, Judaism, Gaza and everything in between, QFWFQ is a meditation on the politics of storytelling, showing that the artist’s assumption that stories remain in silo is a fallible one, and that all of our stories necessarily connect through tissue both invisible and visible.

Starts 8:30PM PT