Wallace Shawn's play is set in the near future, when there have been revolutions in processed food production and sexual explicitness. "Man has two basic needs - the need for food and the need for sex." It imagines a future when the food chain has collapsed through over-industrialisation, allowing Shawn to depict the two needs in a garish new light and to dramatise the most basic way in which our appetites are indistinguishable from animal ones.
Ben, a scientist, tells of his many loves. As his self-obsession literally consumes him, we listen to tales of food, sex and man's true best friend.
Grasses of A Thousand Colors takes as its source The White Cat, a 17th century fairytale by Madame d'Aulnoy, and it moves between a prosperous bourgeois world and a savage dream-like one, in which distinctly taboo things happen between humans and cats.
"Cats like to tease mice. In other words, I'm saying, it's not something that happens by accident when they're pursuing some other more respectable purpose. No. They like to do it."
Grasses of a Thousand Colours had its world premiere at the Royal Court, and was part of their Wallace Shawn season. It was directed by Shawn's long-term collaborator Andre Gregory. Production photo by Alastair Muir.
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