Ilana Gabrielle, Lisa Lamothe, and Jonathan Cruz star as three doctors trying to communicate with the dead in the world premiere of The Séance Machine (photo by Brandon James Gwinn)
The Tank
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
October 10-31, $20-$30
thetanknyc.org
brandonjamesgwinn.com
Sitting around a table with a medium attempting to contact deceased loved ones took off in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century as people flocked to spiritualism. EllaRose Chary and Brandon James Gwinn take communicating with the dead to the next technological level in The Séance Machine, running October 10 through All Hallow’s Eve at the Tank. Cowriters Chary and Gwinn and director Julia Sears invite fifty-six guests a night to spend an hour with Dr. Carolyn Blau’s Mechanical Wave Reassembly Hypercardioid Sequencing Module, the latest in spiritual equipment to deal with ghosts and time travel. NEMOD Industries CEO Carly McPherson explains in a promotional video, “Dr. Blau had the vision for a device capable of letting us hear aspects of our own universe no human ears have ever heard before.”
The cast features Jonathan Cruz (The Hollywood Special Effects Show) as anthropologist and psychologist Dr. John Alvarez, Ilana Gabrielle (It’s a Man’s World, Coming: A Rock Musical . . .) as paleontologist and geologist Dr. Gabby White, and Lisa Lamothe (Incredibly Deaf Musical) as audio-physicist Dr. Blau, with set design by Susannah Hyde and lighting by Annie Garrett-Larsen. Chary and Gwinn have previously collaborated on Cotton Candy and Cocaine, Thelma Louise, Dyke Remix, Queer. People. Time., and other shows and also curate the monthly cabaret series Tank-aret, which returns to the Tank on November 26 with “Maybzgiving: A Queerucopia.”