- A short clip of raw footage.
- An edited sequence following one scene.
- An essay or supporting document about the work.
- The complete feature Film.
This website is an experiment in reimagining the 1990 performance of Father was a Peculiar Man, written by Mira Lani-Oglesby, Reza Abdoh and the cast and directed by Reza Abdoh. Father was a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The novel is a nearly 1000 page meditation on God and human nature wrapped in a murder mystery about a parricide. The novel was Dostoyevsky’s last, and perhaps, his greatest work. A copy of that novel is available on this website.
The performance Father Was a Peculiar Man, conceived by Iranian American Director Reza Abdoh and Mira-Lani Oglesby, set the play in the present as a post-dramatic mélange and contemporary vaudeville. Originally conceived in Los Angeles, the show was reconceived for and produced in New York, by Anne Hamburger and En Garde Arts. Oglesby provided a draft script based on the novel, which included text from the novel, original text related to the novel, and contemporary dialogue about the 80s and 90s U.S. Once in New York, Abdoh used Oglesby’s text as a basis for creating the production rather than a script, inserting additional text, much of it generated by performers, and a series of events including a live action restaging of the Kennedy assassination. Following En Garde Arts dedication to presenting in found spaces, the production was set in the Meat Packing district of Manhattan, then an industrial, rather gritty space which also included sex clubs and sex commerce. The performance more explicitly dealt with the AIDS crisis than the script, the latter of which functioned as an anti-capitalist feminist critique of The Brothers Karamazov.
This website is multimodal and includes: a movie-length cut of the production by Tony Torn, with contextual, historical and dramaturgical information; an annotated version of Mira-Lani Oglesby’s script; an accessible copy of the novel; additional audio and video content from viewers and creators of the work; all fourteen hours of raw footage of the production, backstage work and after party by Miestorm, nested in the physical sites where they were performed; and a series of thematic essays about the production.
Please note that the breakdown of the sections of raw footage are titled in a slightly different way than they were in the original production, which had A Prologue, 8 parts and an epilogue.
The only change of note is the lack of the Inauguration scene, which was likely cut; the others are simply grouped together by site rather than only by theme.