New Paradise Laboratories  

27

(2012) in Philadelphia Live Arts Festival

(2014) at Painted Bride Art Center

Cobain and company hang out with solo cups on the edge of a black hole. Sartre doesn’t show up at the party – something else does.

Welcome to the Afterlife, a la New Paradise Laboratories. The ghosts of Kurt, Janis, Jim, and Amy – all dead at 27 – are whiling away the time in Eternity, officiated by a brilliant flash guitarist and a burning force of Nature with a mind of its own. Think Sartre by way of David Lynch and Jimi Hendrix.

A storm blows through and the 27ers have a new arrival. The question: what should they do with her? What do you do with idle hands in Purgatory?

Mysteries add onto mysteries in this meditation on loops, fame, and the Final Great Adventure. It’s movement theatre at its most kinetic, with live music, live bodies, and dead musical geniuses.