Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Long before she was a multi-hyphenate, award-winning singer/actor/director conjuring different worlds on stages across the globe, E. Faye Butler was enamored of the places she could go via her View-Master. The low-tech, vaguely binocular-shaped toy popular throughout the 1960s was the forerunner to virtual reality goggles: Insert a circular cartridge of slides, hold the gadget to your eyes and you could behold everything from the rings of Saturn to the Great Sphinx to cartoon strips.
‘Goods’
Tickets: $30
“When you had your View-Master, you could go anywhere.. I remember watching Bugs Bunny through it, and he was more spectacular than he was on television. Made me think I was in another world,” Butler said. The artist has devoted her 40+ year career to transporting audiences to other worlds, be it via an August Wilson drama or a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical or a Shakespearean tragedy.
Artemisia Theatre Announces Virtual World Premiere of Lauren Ferebee s GOODS
The year is 2100. Marla and Sam are celebrating their 20th anniversary working together as interplanetary trash collectors.by BWW News Desk
Two intergalactic trash collectors, both women, one Black, one white, are hurtling through space toward the finish of their anniversary route, ready to celebrate their return to Earth. But a surprising job sends them back out to the asteroid belt and forces them to make a devastating choice.
That s the launch pad for Goods, a world premiere play by Lauren Ferebee receiving its virtual world premiere May 5-30, 2021 by Artemisia Theatre. Chicago stage legend E. Faye Butler directs.