Made in USA | Who Left This Fork Here

“Please do not walk on the cakes!” You probably didn’t expect to hear that just before a performance of the “Three Sisters”, but that’s precisely how this 56-minute performance starts from the eminent American director and star of New York’s independent scene, Daniel Fish.

An experimenter of genius with a body of works to his name which straddles theatre, film, opera and essay, Daniel Fish has forged a conceptual theatre which sacrifices none of its vivacity or emotivity, no matter whether he’s directing a classic play by Shakespeare or Molière, a single scene from a screenplay–as he did with Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind”, or fragments from novels by Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.
“Who Left This Fork Here” (2015) is a wired, on-stage dissection of Act Three of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” which features three outstanding performers of different ages–each of whom has a bizarre but clearly specified ‘mission’ to perform among the towers of fantasy cakes, cameras and technicians wandering on and off stage bearing neon lamps, chairs, cables, cameras and microphones.

So are the three performers playing Masha, Olga and Irina? Maybe. The only certainty, however, is that this subversive performance conjures up an electrified stage poem which illuminates both the liminal state of its Chekhovian heroines and a new theatricality.

It premiered at BAC in 2015