A telephone hotline, a vinyl record, a performance.

Is anyone out there? Is anyone listening? Are we alone? In 1977, NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecrafts to try and answer these questions. Aboard both is an artifact intended to communicate who and what we are: The Golden Record. After traveling over 13 billion miles, this proverbial message in a bottle is the farthest human-made object from earth. If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?

To answer this, Theater Mitu created a public telephone hotline prompting people to leave messages to the future. These voicemails make up the source material for a vinyl record and a live performance created in partnership with SETI Institute, Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative, and Brooklyn Independent Middle School.

As we travel through these unprecedented times, Utopian Hotline creates a moment of community. Thirty audience members will gather, not in the darkness of a traditional theater, but under soft light, on a pink carpet, around a communal table, to re-imagine our shared future. Together, we will acknowledge coming into community as a radical action. An action that has consistently shaped this planet’s future. An action that reaffirms that someone is listening, that we are, in fact, not alone.

Created by Theater Mitu, the piece premiered at MITU580 in September 2021.

utopianhotline.com

A long, long time ago—the ‘90s—in a Walmart far, far away, Erica, our Hero of Ages Lost, pushes her shopping cart—that most sacred ancient vessel of capitalism—through the aisles of a memory play. american (tele)visions is an explosive collision between the American Dream and the American Nightmare—the story of an undocumented Mexican family.

With singular wit and pathos, NYTW Tow Playwright-in-Residence Victor I. Cazares creates an epic multiverse where time is fluid and the characters are refracted through literal televisions, imagined video games, endless Walmart aisles, and a double-wide torn in two. NYTW Usual Suspect Rubén Polendo, founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, directs the multi-media production which includes live performance, live camera feeds and pre-recorded video.

A co-production with New York Theatre Workshop

“War is inevitable — but there are miracles. Every day millions of people die, yet we live as if death will never touch us.”
– St. Vyasa, The Mahabharata

These words sit at the heart of one of the greatest epic poems— a meditation on war, death, and loss. Its core question is of a particular resonance: what should we fight for and why?

In an attempt to understand this exact question, Theater Mitu spent two years gathering interviews with a range of communities worldwide: current and past members of military forces; citizens who have been directly affected by war; people diagnosed with terminal illness and their families; nurses, spiritual leaders, scholars, and mental health professionals. As they touch upon, come to the edge of, and often confront death, each interview becomes a portrait of what is left behind — a remnant.

The result is a new multi-platform work— part performance, part interactive digital experience. Engaging Theater Mitu’s anti-disciplinary approach to art-making, this original work merges interviews with found text, spatialized audio, projection mapping, and interactive digital art. This work offers an intimate reflection on how loss can scar us, shape us, and at times propel us towards change.

Tours of the in-person production are on hold due to COVID-19 but the interactive digital experience is currently available for virtual exhibition. Please contact [email protected] for more information and visit thisiswhatoneminutefeelslike.com

Held hostage by their past, a family grapples with failure, worth and a world closing in around them. In this hyper-theatrical production, human beings become objects, music carries the memory of days long gone, and a life is reduced to a mortgage.

Theater Mitu’s staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman  explores a landscape of unrealized hopes and asks what happens when you are written out of the American Dream.