From Whit MacLaughlin 
OBIE and Barrymore Award-winning Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories

… Sebastienne Mundheim, Founder and Artistic Director of White Box Theatre, and her creative team have woven together fact, fiction, and powerful imagery to create a beguiling and lucid portrait of this elusive figure. The result is almost a séance, rendering Kea, a ghostlike but imposing figure, into a forcefully real presence. Quiet, insightful storytelling and lyrics, written and delivered by Mundheim in a respectful, almost scholarly way, combine with an ethereal musical score, and surprising, always evocative puppetry, to create a difficult-to-describe weave of subtle and not-so-subtle effects. One might call the style “epic poetry of objects,” or “cinematic sculpture.”

…The inventiveness of the physical life of the piece is substantial and impressively deep. Rarely have I seen such sophisticated puppetry marshaled towards a truly phantasmagoric assembly of effects.

Taken together, the silence, the sound, the words, and the music cohere into a startlingly concrete biography that reflects powerfully on the life of a true American original, whose complexity and subtlety might render her story too slippery to tell. Mundheim’s trans-medial approach is deployed sensitively and with just the right touch.