The Cenci

by Antonin Artaud / Translation by Richard Sieburth

Adapted and Directed by John Jahnke

Ohio Theatre, New York City, 2008

Created in part through residencies at

The Watermill Center and The MacDowell Colony

Artaud's infamous version of the Roman scandal of 1599 takes on a wicked life of its own in his lurid account of a wealthy family felled by incest, murder, and Papal oppression. This rarely staged Theatre of Cruelty work, in its first American translation created specifically for The Hotel Savant by Richard Sieburth of the French Institute/NYU, is mounted in a uniquely terse yet evocative fashion. Specters of the past, the Cencis invoke our modern day obsession with private lives lived publicly and sensationally, knowingly pursued yet simultaneously trapped by the media attention they invite.