Cosmic Microwave Background

About this event

New Hazlett Theater presents

by Julia Fraser

Cosmic Microwave Background by Julia Fraser is a full-length play that shakes the human anxieties and optimism from the digital age. Rita, a former translator of 19th-century Romantic poetry, and her husband leave New York City in search of remote serenity in the desert. Each morning, they drink coffee, read, and discuss the news on their phones. They escape in funny animal stories and tense at the latest story about fires ravaging the natural landscape.

Once settled, Rita hears a persistent, snaking sound lacing through the desert landscape that her practical husband cannot hear. She recites poems by Leopardi in Italian and struggles to translate the work, her ears punctured by the mysterious sound. When her tech-optimist neighbor echoes an interest, they set out to uncover the sound trilling in her ears before it explodes her sanity. Is it new technology in the air? Is Rita, translator of the poetic past, able to tune to contemporary noise? Or does she hear what no one else can: the relic radiation filling the universe, the cosmic microwave background? What do you hear?

From New Hazlett Center for Performing Arts