Astrs - Paperback

by Karinne Keithley Syers (Author)

A rabbit cosmogony, a libretto to be sung, spoken, and projected, a radio-play-folk-opera-duck-animation-with-dances, ASTRS is set in the 53rd State of the Union, zone of the sixth chrysanthemum, where Augustus B. Rabbit and Sibyl Kempson meet in a place where the end times can't seem to wrap it up and the middle times hang around eternally. A pre-middle play by 53rd State's founding editor offers a roadmap to the 53rd State and to the troubled state of the present fifty. It should come as no surprise: "in the cosmos," as Keithley writes, "associations ring across disances. In the 53rd state they meet in the corner."

Author Biography

Karinne Keithley Syers is a writer and teacher based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her performance work tends toward an interdisciplinary spectrum, incorporating sound and movement. Plays include A Tunnel Year (Chocolate Factory Theater,
2016), Another Tree Dance (Chocolate Factory, 2013), Do Not Do this Ever Again (Ice Factory, 2008), Tenderenda (Danspace Project, 2005), Four Fruits (Surf Reality, 2000), and Montgomery Park, or Opulence (Incubator Arts Project, 2010), for which she won a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production. She has been a two-time fellow at The MacDowell Colony, a member of the Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, a two-time member of Puppet Lab at St. Ann's Warehouse, and is grateful to be a member of New Dramatists. She founded 53rd State Press, home to her editorial experiments as a participant-historian of the downtown performance community. She co-founded Ur, a dance palace (2003-5), instigated the playwright think tank Joyce Cho, and co-hosted (with Jason Grote) the Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU. She collaborated as a performer, librettist, sound and video designer, and choreographer, with artists including Big Dance Theater, Sara Smith, David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Sibyl Kempson, Theater of a Two Headed Calf, Chris Yon, The Civilians, and Talking Band. MFA in Playwriting, Brooklyn College (2006); PhD in English, CUNY Graduate Center (2014).