Game Play Goes Global

Game Play Goes Global

Award winning theatre company The PlayGround Collective is heading to New York to present their new show All Your Wants and Needs Fulfilled Forever at LaMaMa in downtown Manhattan as part of the New Zealand New Performance Festival New York.

Billed as an ‘8-Bit Action Adventure’ the show will have its international debut from the 19th to the 22nd of March 2015, before it returns to Auckland for a season at Q Theatre later in 2015. The company kicked off their announcement with the launch of a new trailer.

Director Robin Kerr says: “The show is an ode to the digital natives who’ve grown up on video games and movies that promised us we were going to be heroes, that we’ll get the girl, and beat the baddies. Now that we’re kidults we've discovered that life isn’t really like that. It’s a lot easier to recede into a fantasy; pretend that life is ‘A-OKAY’ on facebook, than it is to deal with our offline problems. That’s something that’s universal for our generation and it’s as true as it is for Americans who’ve grown up immersed in that culture as it is here.”

Press Play...
Super Mario Bros, a philosophizing gorilla, and a murderous kiwi icon collide in this hilariously absurd 8-Bit action adventure.

Simon studies video game design and looks after his pet rats –all while glued to whatever screen is nearest–in an effort to avoid thinking about the recent death of his father. But Simon’s world is turned upside down when a mysterious box is delivered to him that might just contain the Secret to the Universe...

Is he playing the game – or is the game playing him? Simon scrolls his way through the often tragic randomness of life as a higher intelligence tries to guide his story to a satisfying conclusion.

“This is a poignant funny story about someone who’s going through life with all its glitches.”

Director Robin Kerr and Bruce Mason and Arts Foundation New Generation Award winning playwright Eli Kent take you on meta-theatrical ride featuring action-packed mime, original songs, and a pulsing electronic score all performed live.

Since forming in 2007, The PlayGround Collective have produced nine shows and won nine Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, including “Most Original Production” for The Intricate Art of Actually Caring, and were highly commended in Metro Magazine’s Best of Auckland Theatre 2010. Auckland audiences will familiar with their recent show Like There’s No Tomorrow which was commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company and premiered to sell out crowds at the Basement Theatre last year.

The New Zealand New Performance Festival New York has been running a Boosted crowdfunding campaign that has raised over $13,000 towards a $15 000 goal. The festival will see 10 shows and 20 artists present some of NZ’s most cutting edge theatre to New York audiences in four different performance spaces during the two week festival. The Boosted campaign is accepting donations online until Sunday 5th of October.

Profiles of all of the artists and shows in the festival, including a trailer for All Your Wants and Need Fulfilled Forever can be found on www.nznewperformance.com

ENDS

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