Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble: Maine Theatre Group - live theatre about myth and culture

"The Cure is a reworking of a play that I created in 1991. The version done by the Ziggurat Theatre is a fully realized version of what was really no more than a workshop in its first incarnation. The majority of this 45 minute play is a faith-healing ceremony to raise a dying girl. The play has three goals: 1) to devise a play where there was a story and yet where the audience did not have language to rely on. The sparse dialogue was in an invented language foreign to everybody; and most of the communication was through the ritualized sound and movements of the healers. 2) to create the experience for the audience of eavesdropping on a real event. For this reason the play was played, not in a theater, but in a room; was lit without stage lighting; and was without programs or ushers – the usual trappings of a night at the theater. 3) to try to engender a transcendent experience for the audience. Only those in the audience can say whether we failed or succeeded."