Sinking Ship & Theater in Quarantine present
a live-streamed digital theater performance
based on The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem
Created by:
Director
Jonathan Levin
Playwright
Josh Luxenberg
Performer
Joshua William Gelb
Watch on demanD
Live performances are completed, but you can view the recorded streams at your convenience.
The show is FREE to watch, but not to produce. If you can afford it, please consider a suggested donation of $10 per viewer.
“A satire of the infinite human capacity for self-defeat... wonderfully apt for our social-distancing moment.”
“A truly impossible, impressive piece of quarantine theater... Work like ‘The 7th Voyage’ makes confinement a virtue, a prompt to imagination.”
The team behind A Hunger Artist, in collaboration with Theater in Quarantine, returns with an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s story—set in outer space, performed in a closet in the East Village, and beamed straight to you in whichever room you’re finding yourself stuck in.
This is not a Zoom reading. This is not a movie. We are making theater for the camera—and as usual with Sinking Ship, it's a complex project unlike anything we've ever done that could fail in any number of ways. It’s gonna be fun.
Space traveler Egon Tichy likes his quiet time.
But when his ship gets hit by a chunk of interstellar detritus, he’s sent careening into a minefield of time vortexes. This slapstick science-fiction adventure propels Theater in Quarantine into its most technically ambitious production to date, improbably trapping performer Joshua William Gelb amidst an exponentially expanding cast of one.
Join us in the live chat during and after each performance.
Running time: 36 mins
Adapted with permission from the estate of Stanislaw Lem.
Our co-producer
Theater in Quarantine is a Drama League Award-winning performance laboratory dedicated to the exploration of the live theatrical experience in the digital space. Developed in response to the pandemic by Founder/Co-Creative Director Joshua William Gelb and Co-Creative Director Katie Rose McLaughlin, TiQ has developed and live streamed over 25 new, original works of performance in the last year alone. TiQ has worked with an array of remote collaborators (including Raja Feather Kelly, Heather Christian, Karen Olivo, Underground Railroad Game’s Scott R. Sheppard, and Sinking Ship Productions); and has been established as one of the most consistent makers of digital performance, having been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, on NPR’s All Things Considered; and reached audiences across the globe. Their work has been called "Virtuosic" by Jesse Green in the New York Times, who wrote, "The closet has produced some of the new medium’s most imaginative work." Helen Shaw in Vulture wrote that the closet “makes confinement a virtue, a prompt to imagination.” TiQ’s full archive can be found and streamed anytime on their YouTube channel at youtube.com/theaterinquarantine.
Directed by
Jonathan Levin
Written by
Josh Luxenberg
Performed by
Joshua William Gelb*
Sound Design
M. Florian Staab*
Set & Costume Design
Peiyi Wong*
Video Design
Jesse Garrison*
Additional Voices
Fayette Louise Jared & D.M.J.
End Credits Music performed by
Emily Hope Price
*Sinking Ship Associate Artist
Behind the scenes
Find out what’s live, and what’s not, and watch alongside our animated storyboard that we used to piece the whole thing together.
This presentation of The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy was made possible by funding from:
The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature
The Dime Community Bank Fund for NYC Theatres, a program of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York)
