Made in USA | Showcase

An actor, quite naked, in a hotel room in downtown Athens. Beside him, just a breath away, us—the audience. With just his shadow for company, he talks to himself, playing a businessmen in a startlingly unfeigned way. He can close the most difficult deal, he says, but the simplest dilemmas in his personal life are beyond him.

The monologue, written and directed by the great Richard Maxwell, lasts just thirty minutes, but half an hour is enough to reveal what clinically accurate realism means in both acting and business management.

A core member of the New York City Players and a close associate of Maxwell for fifteen years, the outstanding Jim Fletcher (b.1963) takes on the dual role of the naked businessman and our guide to a new sense of theatricality.

In this non-theatrical space, the common ground of an anti-theatrical hotel room, verisimilitude seems to acquire a new logic as the familiar becomes absurd and performer and audience sign up to a new contract stating what theatre ultimately is.