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Stills and video from live performance of ANGER/FLY at Trap Door Theater 2012, Chicago, USA written by Ruth Margraff, after Eugene Ionesco's film scenario La Colere directed by Kate Hendrickson. ANGER/FLY was commissioned by an Individual Artist Project grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Painting details exhibited at Sullivan Galleries, Art Institute of Chicago December 13, 2013 through February 16, 2014 with Ruth Margraff's latex transient frescos and painted sculptural work by Andrea Myers. PRESS QUOTES A frenzied microcosm of urgently insistent chaos in world premiere of playwright Ruth Margraff’s ANGER/FLY...with ferocious playfulness and stylized visceral severity; leaving us deer caught in the headlights of this bulldozer of brazen absurdity. ANGER/FLY is frenetic. It is fantastical and it is most certainly fun. It is also a deceptively subversive playground of profundity...Playwright Margraff has created a shiny happy surface to a psychotically volatile underlying dynamic. It is live-action cubism of Ionesco’s already absurd observation. Director Kate Hendrickson is exacting in her vision...a literal ballet of bedlam...a canvas for the splattering of color that concludes the show...The deliciously deranged ensemble takes on the madness at full throttle...They create hysterically gross exaggerations of our daily exaggerations. Stellar performances by the entire cast bait us into the whimsical peculiarity and then plunge us into the explosive eruptions of this sublimely surreal delight...that should not be missed! ~ Venus Harris, 4 STARS Chicago Stage Review BEST OF CHICAGO 2012 “BEST STRING OF THEATRICAL STUNNERS: TRAP DOOR THEATER” And lately, an astonishing one…signaling a new level of mastery—canny choices, vividly realized…and the latest marvel Anger/Fly [review of Anger/Fly]: Striking…rich…charismatic—even seductive—astonishing…and just incidentally, a bout of slapstick paint-splattering goes further than any Clement Greenberg essay in evoking the cultural rage and despair underpinning Jackson Pollack’s art. Recommended and Short Listed! —Tony Adler, Chicago Reader Masterful… Brechtian…extremely funny…incisive…apocalyptic…striking expressionistic choreography and sound design and, most of all, the writing itself. Margraff's enlivened the diegesis with both very funny one-liners and poetic, solemn monologues that…underscore the bravery of a show that takes risks-and takes this brand of theater seriously. Recommended! - Monica Westin, New City Stage A TRIUMPHANT FLY TO BUZZ ABOUT ...A journey far beyond the bounds of lucidity…visceral and truly stunning…This is Theatre of the Absurd done right...Anger/Fly stays true to Ionesco’s iconical style of absurdism...a delightful flurry of constant motion…extremely inventive…there is always something eye-grabbing to watch…Trap Door Theatre’s world premiere of Anger/Fly is truly an inventive, unparalleled work of art.~ Paul Kubicki, Stage & Cinema An orgy of paint, sex, and violence that covers the stage. The nine-person cast engenders rapt attention through their captivating performances…charismatic… hypnotic…The production is dazzling…Anger/Fly will engage you almost to surfeit. Recommended! —Keith Glab, Chicago Theater Beat Raucous, challenging, giddy…dissects marriages, class hierarchies and social contracts from the fringe of his blissfully ignorant, well-to-do fellow townsfolk as they scapegoat and conform themselves to their own demise… with bubble blowers, expressionist gestures and a candy-colored kaleidoscope. Critic’s Pick and Story of the Week—Dan Jakes, Time Out Chicago There is enormous fun to be had here. Mike Mroch's all-white set brings to mind the cabinet-door prankishness of "Laugh-In," and pop songs from Simon and Garfunkel and Led Zeppelin give the show an off-kilter sensibility. The impossibly tall David Steiger delivers a lanky, witty, furrowed-brow of a performance that is at once goofy and enigmatic and you can't take your eyes off of him. He is well-matched with Tiffany Bedwell as his wife, who wears a perpetually bright, perky, Teflon smile — until she doesn't. It's a gas watching them. —Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune