Theater Grottesco Retells “Beowulf”

Stalwart Theater Grottesco co-founder John Flax—himself an accomplished director and performer with training from France’s prestigious School Jacques Lecoq—tells SFR that his indie powerhouse troupe has perhaps flown under the radar since the pandemic times.

Sure, Grottesco has dipped its toe into live performance post-COVID with a collection of shorts and a pop-up show dubbed Santa Fe Survey that traveled in the area, but with its new original piece Two Artists in Prison debuting this week at Teatro Paraguas’ second space (a smaller stage at the enduring Midtown performing arts center), Flax says the company is getting back into the longer-form game, even if the show only clocks in at about 60 minutes.

“It’s been marinating for a long time,” he says of the new show. “I first started talking about it with an old Belgian colleague of mine—Joz Houben, who was at the Lecoq with me in the ‘80s. It has been at least 10 years that I’ve been thinking of this.”

Luckily, Two Artists in Prison coming together now feels timely. In a not-too-distant and dystopian future, artists, journalists and free-thinkers are locked away at the hands of an unseen oppressive government. The prisoners are then ordered to tell their captors stories on a daily basis; we follow two such artist-prisoners, played by local mainstays Danielle Louise Reddick and Mona Malec, on a day they’re ordered to recount the ancient epic Beowulf. One artist is at least somewhat familiar with the story, the other is not; they must work together to spin an entertaining yarn lest they face some unknowable punishment. Like all Grottesco pieces, Two Artists is an original piece created through company collaboration. Flax co-directs with Apollo Garcia.

“We were inspired by Seamus Heaney, who did a spectacular translation of Beowulf [in 1999], and Maria Dahvana Headley’s [in 2020],” Flax says. “We were inspired by the book Grendel, which tells the Beowulf story from Grendel’s perspective.”

The ultimate impetus for merging a sort of Big Brother-y imprisonment narrative with that of an ancient, enduring poem?

“We thought as a public we really needed to imagine this, because cultures throughout history have had the wrong people imprisoned, and sometimes it feels frighteningly close,” Flax says. “Before journalists, musicians told the stories and created the legends and myths; in Beowulf, we have the classic story from the winners’ perspective—it’s an old story that was probably first a Pagan story, then a Christian story, and if you look at Grendel as representing the Pagan world…we wanted to show that Grendel maybe had some reasons to do what he did and maybe wasn’t just a monster.”

The old chestnut of good versus evil might just be the oldest story we have, and Flax says it’s important to examine both sides for either to make any sense in the context of storytelling. Beyond that, he won’t reveal anything else about the new show, save that there might be some twists audiences won’t see coming. For now, Flax does have one last piece of advice:

“Because it’s a small theater, we don’t want people to get disappointed if they do that Santa Fe thing and wait too long to get tickets and it’s sold out,” he advises.

Two Artists in Prison: 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday; 2 pm Sunday through Thursday, June 6. $20-$35. Teatro Paraguas, 3205 Calle Marie, (505) 424-1601