A Profound Transformation

The Mummery Book
— part 5

"I felt I was in a different place when I came out."

— Elizabeth Gjelten
Playwright, Teacher

You will certainly find The Mummery Book entertaining, but that is not its fundamental purpose. Its real aim is to transform you.

Its overwhelming power and sensory richness work — like Orpheus' lyre — to strip away your defenses. As one audience member put it, "It made me drop all my intellectual pre-conceptions. All my weaponry."

If you then participate fully, allowing the players and the images in the physical theatre to simultaneously play in your "room" of mind, you will be drawn through changes — even while staying within the framework of your current philosophical, religious, or spiritual point of view.

You may discover an opening to life at a level of feeling rarely experienced, a heightened sensitivity to the realities of love and loss and death, and a sense of how you play a role in the mummery of ordinary life.

The length of the performance — eight hours, spread over two days — gives you the space to not only go through the gamut of moods and responses, but to also emerge transformed.

Can this piece engage you for that length of time? One recent attendee said,

"I came with some ideas about the length. I think a lot of people did. I was worried that I'd be terrifically bored after a couple of hours. But as it turns out, great theatre keeps you going."

Next: Theatre in the Sur-round