A dark comedy about Salvador Dali’s “Dream of Venus” funhouse, built for the 1939 World’s Fair, and the women who put on rubber tails to work as “mermaids” in the surrealistic peep show inside. The longer the mermaids stay in the funhouse, the more they unravel ideas about fear, male power, and their own desires.
Production History-
Bedlam Theater, Minneapolis MN, July 2009. Directed by Samantha Johns.
Box Wine Theater, Minneapolis MN, July 2012. Directed by Adam Sharp.
Truepenny Theater, Milwaukee WI, October 2016. Directed By Tessara Morgan.
Dali’s Liquid Ladies at Bedlam, Carl Atiya Swanson, Cake in 15
“The cumulative effect is ecstatic and wrenching, a phantasmagoria of desire distilled to unnerving honesty.”
Bedlam’s Dali-DADA, Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet
“Liquid Ladies is a tremendously enjoyable romp, but impressively, Reich manages to actually engage the premise of surrealism generally and Dalí’s pavilion specifically.”
Via Box Wine Theater, Dali’s Liquid Ladies Gets Deep, Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet.
“…for all its accessibility, Reich’s script starts upshifting soon after the curtain rises and by the time the curtain (or virtual curtain) falls, the play’s firing afterburners.”
The Top Ten Productions of 2009, Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet.
“Dalí’s Liquid Ladies took a strong premise—a look behind the scenes at the surrealistic pavilion Salvador Dalí (played by an inspired Jon Mac Cole) built for the 1939 World’s Fair—and pushed it into further realms, and then into realms further still. In its short running time, the show sketched the connections and tensions between fear and desire, between freedom and restraint, and between the real and the surreal. More than just demonstrating why Dalí’s ideas were so powerful, the show was also—like Dalí himself—funny, erotic, and deeply strange.”
Savannah Reich 