Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Spotlight on Martin Dockery - News from the IT Awards:

Martin Dockery is a frequent performer in New York’s storytelling scene, appearing on the stages of The Moth, Speakeasy, The Liar Show, Told, Risk!, LES Stories, and Sideshow Goshko. His previous theatrical monologues (developed with director Jean-Michele Gregory) Wanderlust and The Surprise, received critical success in New York as well as in San Francisco, Orlando, London, Toronto, and Winnipeg and garnered numerous awards. Dockery was also a co-creator of the play C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, which ran on Broadway as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (heard of it?) and is a seven-time finalist in The Moth’s bi-annual Grandslam Storytelling Championship.

This month Dockery returns to Off-Off-Broadway and we look forward with great interest to his newest solo work, The Bike Trip, debuting on February 25 at the Kraine Theatre as a part of the FRIGID Festival. Martin describes The Bike Trip as is his quest “to understand why the drug LSD has enthralled and terrified so many thousands of people.” On his search to uncover the nature of the psychedelic experience, Dockery journeys through the psychedelic scenes of San Francisco, India and Switzerland. To replicate history’s first ever acid trip, he recreates the bizarre bicycle ride of a Swiss pharmacologist 65 years ago that unexpectedly introduced the world to LSD and altered the way millions of people perceive the nature of consciousness. “The public perception of LSD is frozen in a 1960s tie-dyed haze, and yet its use is as prevalent - and as secretive - as ever,” Dockery explains.

The Bike Trip tells a very personal tale as it attempts to look anew at this most powerful of all psychotropic substances…like The Surprise, it’s an autobiographical storytelling show, performed without a script, making each night unique.” After FRIGID, Dockery will then bring to festivals in Fresno, Phoenix, Orlando, London, Winnipeg, Victoria, & Vancouver among others.