A Theater Performance

2012 Icarus Award to Gergana Dimitrova for “Best Direction”

2012 Icarus Award to Zdrava Kamenova and Gergana Dimitrova  for “New Playwriting”

The project’s team:

Text: Zdrava Kamenova and Gergana Dimitrova

Director:  Gergana Dimitrova / 36 Monkeys

Assistant Director: Petko Stoyanov

Original music: Todor Stoyanov (Ambient Anarchist)

Video Art: Vladislav Iliev and Lyubomir Draganov (Phormatik Visual Lab), Kamen Dimitrov, Nikola Nalbantov

Set, lights and costume design: Elena Shopova

Sound: Yasen Toshev

English subtitles: Atanas Igov

Blog: Nadia Nikova

Photographer: Victoria Atanasova

Cast: Elena Atanasova, Nadejda Panayotova, Bogdan Kazandjiev, Peter Meltev

Project coordination: A25 Cultural Foundation

Volunteers: Lora Boyanova, Tzvetan Tolev, Denica Stoyanova, Boryana Teofarova, Alexandrina Kozovska, Detelina Gurbatova

The play P.O.Box Unabomber came into being in 2010 as a result of the experimental collaboration between Zdrava Kamenova, a playwright and Gergana Dimitrova, a theatre  director, on the occasion of the fourth edition of ProText: Made in Bulgaria. Back then it was staged as a reading performance at the National Museum of Natural History. Now P.O.Box Unabomber is turned into a full-length theatre performance, which is a rare event in new Bulgarian playwriting. Nevertheless, the determination of avoiding box-set theatre stages remains, so this time P.O.Box Unabomber is performed in the gallery space of Suspacious architectural lightening design studio. Also worth mentioning is that P.O. Box Unabomber was among the 15 preselected projects included into the main program of the first-ever Independent Theater Festival that took place in Sofia in November 2011.

P.O.Box Unanbomber fuses ecology with terrorism. And it seems the result is an exciting piece of theater eco-terrorism that asks important contemporary questions but in a light manner, without losing its sense of humor. The structure of the play rather resembles a puzzle, in which the roads of Ted Kaczynski (a promising math professor who abandoned his academic career to become a social critic, genius and long sought-after terrorist) and the Proechidna (an ancient, intelligent, egg-laying mammal who is about to go  extinct) intersect and overlap at different levels. And while Kaczynski begins to apply his radical means in order to warn society about the dangers of the rapidly-developing technology to human dignity (see his manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future”), the Proechidna, who probably lived on Earth even during the Ice Age is now doomed to wander in search for a mate of its kind. Furthermore, there are also Kaczynski’s family, complacent scientists determined to conquer the interplanetary space, drivers, policemen and a satellite overlooking all of them.

Premiere: Altronics Light space,Sofia Bulgaria, 2011

Partner: Altronics Light, Hungarian Cultural Institute and "Aleko Konstantinov" State Satirical Theatre

Project is realized with the financial support of Sofia Municipality – “Culture” programme and Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria