10,000 Things

An exploration of the limits of mercy and extent of distraction in a busy age. How do we care for the things that need tending? How do we wake up our eyes? At the center of the process: text + shadows… shadow puppetry, shadows as design elements, and – shadow as cultural erasure. A multi-part experiment in process-driven theatre, 10,000 Things by acclaimed playwright Erik Ehn is an ensemble-based exercise in contemplative theatre that unlike anything else.

Erik Ehn is an American playwright and director known for proposing the Regional Alternative Theatre movement. His work includes The Saint Plays, Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, Maria Kizito, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He is an artistic associate at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen, most recently writing Crazy Horse for them, which combined Noh forms with Native American music and dance. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York (BACA, Whitney Museum), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), and elsewhere; he has a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Undermain Theater in Dallas. He is co-founder of the Tenderloin Opera Company in San Francisco and Providence and the former dean of theater at CalArts, the California Institute of Arts. Today he is head of playwriting and professor of theatre and performance studies at Brown University.