FLAMINGO / WINNEBAGO
A 'theatrical road trip' that follows two journeys: One, An Indian immigrant who runs a Sinclair gas station in New Jersey, notices the bees are dying and takes off into the American West in a Winnebago; and two, A young man searches for his past at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Road-side attractions include: New Mexican pueblos, the Wigwam Motel, Route 66, RV parks, the Las Vegas Monorail and Korean Karaoke. FLAMINGO/WINNEBAGO explores the planet's tipping point: the US's excessive use of energy, peak oil theory, and the rapidly changing weather.

> Designed & Directed by Thaddeus Phillips
> Created & Written by Jeremy Wilhelm, Tatiana Mallarino, Muni Kulasinghe, Charlotte Ford, Lars Jan, Melinda Helfrich & Thaddeus Phillips.
> Lights by Drew Billiau
> Video by Lars Jan

WESTERN PREMIERE at the TRICKLOCK COMPANY'S REVOLUTIONS INTERNATIONAL THEATER FESTIVAL in Albuquerque, New Mexico

January 21 & 22, 2010
TOUR:
STERIJINO POZORJE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL (Serbia)
THE COLORADO COLLEGE SUMMER ARTS FESTIVAL (Colorado Springs)
THE PHILADELPHIA LIVE ARTS FESTIVAL

PRESS:
WHAT A TRIP
‘Flamingo/Winnebago’ embarks on epic quest through the West
By MARK ARNEST
THE GAZETTE (Colorado Springs, Colorado)
July 5, 2007

Thaddeus Phillips has made a career out of successfully combining things that appear incompatible.

The actor, director and playwright has used toy soldiers to create a powerful antiwar statement in his one-man version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” “Drive-In Lost Soles” explored the Cuban revolution through the medium of tap-dancing. In “El Conquistador!” he convincingly played off of filmed characters in an avant-garde take on Hispanic telenovelas.

“Flamingo/Winnebago” — the new Phillips show that premieres Thursday at Colorado College — may be his most timely creation yet, with one of its story lines dealing with the cutting-edge issues of disappearing bees, global warming and Peak Oil, the theory that the era of cheap oil is coming to an end.

“Muni (Kulasinghe, another actor in the show) plays an Indian immigrant who runs a gas station,” Phillips said. “He notices the bees are gone from the trash cans. It’s the first thing that hits home for him about the reality of climate change.”

The character sets off across the country in a vegetable-oilpowered Winnebago, heading for Bombay Beach in California. In a diner in Kingman, Ariz., he meets Phillips’ character — a man in the throes of a midlife crisis, who’s headed for Las Vegas on a bicycle to learn about his grandfather.

That character is partly autobiographical: Phillips’ grandfather was Abe Schiller, a Las Vegas legend who was publicist for the Flamingo. Schiller was known as “the Jewish Cowboy” and was famous for his collection of flamboyant, hand-embroidered cowboy suits.

“I never knew him,” Phillips said. “My mom was the result of a one-night stand between him and a showgirl.”

Phillips calls the result an “epic theatrical road trip” — and to play up its epic qualities, the play will have a more opulent look than his other shows, which were designed to be easily transportable.

“There will be huge video things to overwhelm you, like Las Vegas,” Phillips said. Panoramic shots of the West will also help set the scene.

There’s even a 3-D video segment, with glasses provided.

“Of course, all live theater is 3-D,” Phillips said.

And the show will also feature underscoring by Kulasinghe’s band, Le Chat Lunatique, an Albuquerque-based gypsy jazz quartet.

In researching his grandfather, Phillips was surprised at how little he could find about a person who had such a well-known public persona.

“His Las Vegas is gone,” Phillips said. “Nobody there knows anything about the city’s history.”

Phillips was also struck by the visual similarity of a nuclear explosion and the implosion of the old strip hotels.

“That part of the play is based on the idea of erasing the past,” he said.



THE INDEPENDENT (Colorado Springs, Colorado)
July 12-18, 2007
"Time out of mind: Flamingo/Winnebago puts a bizarre American half-century in its headlights".
by Frances Gomeztagle

Traveling along Route 66 this past year, Thaddeus Phillips and Tatiana Mallarino found RV parks, drive-up diners and the mullet of accommodations: a wigwam motel consisting of free-standing, teepee-shaped rooms. Phillips and Mallarino, co-directors and creative generators for theater company Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, drove from New York to Las Vegas seeking out Phillips' roots. Phillips says his grandfather was Abe Schiller, the Las Vegas hotel and casino promoter who wore a cowboy suit with flamingoes all over it and rubbed elbows with Howard Hughes and Gary Cooper.

For Phillips, the images of a bygone America provided a surreal, apocalyptic undertone when mixed with Las Vegas' bright lights and excessive energy use, carbon emissions and nuclear testing. For example, Phillips says that in the '50s, people sat in Las Vegas lounges and watched the horizon balloon with mushroom clouds from the atomic testing being done 65 miles away.

So he decided to create a play exploring the ecological disaster unraveling in our time, or as he calls it, "a theatrical movie ... that feels like a concert."

Flamingo/ Winnebago follows two characters. Muni is an Indian immigrant who owns a gas station in New Jersey. The other character is Thaddeus Phillips. That's not a mistake — Phillips plays himself.

In the play, Muni finds out the North American bee is disappearing. Compelled by Einstein's quote that humanity will die off four years after the extinction of bees, Muni drives an RV across the country to find out what's happening.

At the same time, Phillips, a New York actor, is riding a bicycle in a television commercial shoot in New York City. He gets the sudden impulse to take off on the bike and ride to Las Vegas in search of information about his grandfather.

The two characters separately tread through the Western landscape, encountering misadventures and crazies. A stage-wide screen shows images of the West while a one-room structure in the center of the stage alternately serves as a diner, a gas station, a wigwam motel room, an RV park and the Winnebago. Based on a gas station along Route 66, the room has a large triangular awning and big windows, allowing the audience to see the screen behind it.

The doppelganger theme running through the production continues in Muni's character, played by Muni Kulasinghe. He performs the play's score live with his gypsy jazz band Le Chat Lunatique (or The Crazy Cat, for all you non-Parisians).

Fear not: Flamingo/Winnebago won't be all surreal Western landscapes, live jazz, wigwams and ecological crisis. Phillips says the mood will be comical, drawing on some element of absurdity in America's gluttonous consumerism.