Overview
Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.
DirectorMeredith Monk
ProducersPeter Sciscioli
WritersMeredith Monk
Top Casts
Meredith Monk
Child
Ping Chong
The Dictator
Steve Clorfeine
Dictator's Aide
Tone Blevins
Old Testament woman / Dictator
Daniel Ira Sverdlik
Old Testament man / Dictator
Lanny Harrison
Radio Singer / Announcer / Woman in a flowered dress / Dictator
Monica Moseley
Woman at a table / Dictator
Pablo Vela
Man with grey hair / Dictator
Lee Nagrin
Woman with Gray Hair
Mary Shultz
Woman at Table
Details
LanguageEnglish
Production companiesNew York Public Library of Performing Arts, The House Foundation for the Arts