How to adapt an unadaptable novel famed for its postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions? For Los Angeles performer Gregory Nussen, there can be only one solution: a play built out of postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions.
That is what becomes of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller as filtered, refracted and reinvented by Nussen and directed by Hannah Pilkes. What in 1979 was a head-spinning novel about the reader trying to make sense of the novel’s unrelated manuscripts becomes, with the actor’s charm, wit and storytelling chops, a playful one-person show that has a fierce political heart beneath its metatheatrical games.
