Join CAVS for our annual Giant Art Party. We’ll be whipping up some Eastern European treats, dressing in our warmest rabbit skin hats, and reprising Definitely Maybe, a toy theater show.
CAVS fellow John Bell joins CAVS artists, staff and MIT students in the design, construction, and performance of the Great Small Works toy theater show, Definitely Maybe. Based on the novel of the same name by the acclaimed Soviet science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Definitely Maybe questions the limits of scientific knowledge and discovery in the modern world from the perspective of a handful of Soviet scientists of the 1970s who are all on the verge of important breakthroughs. The mysterious and often surreal ways in which they are all prevented from advancing their work turn out to be the effects the Homeostatic Universe, a vast, undefined force of Nature that insists on maintaining creation-wide entropy. Definitely Maybe poses questions about the limits of modern knowledge and the ecological effects of modern society through a series of fantastic, comic, and spectacular tableaux on a miniature toy theater stage representing a Soviet-era apartment building.
Definitely Maybe, a novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, was adapted for the toy theater by John Bell, Larissa Harris and Jessica Rylan, with Jenny Romaine from Great Small Works, and MIT student Shaunalynn Duffy. Special thanks to Slava Gerovitch for his dramaturgical advice. Set and puppet designs by Isaac Bell and Meg Rotzel; stage construction by Kaolin Kinsey; stage design by Joe Zane; special synthesizer effects created by Jessica Rylan.
