The Neuromancer movie may never get off the ground, but a performance/video installation version is coming to New York next week. When Sasha Grey accepted her Fleshbot award via video last night, she mentioned she's co-starring in a Neuromancer performance.
How exactly does Case manage to last six hours? The program says it goes from noon to six on Sunday Nov. 22 at the New Museum — and Grey mentioned those times as well. I'm guessing there's some repetition in there, but will Grey and the other performers be there the whole time? Possibly the "faux virtual reality" sequences involving sculptures and Gamelan music will occupy five of the six hours?
Update: creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, "The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece. A mention of that might clear up any confusion. Viewers can come and go as they wish throughout the day.
Update #2: Gibson tweeted about this event:
Gol' dang! It's news to me!
Sasha Grey feels more like a character from Virtual Light, to me, but then she feels so *exactly* like that. Heh.
In any case, here's the official description:
An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson's1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux "virtual reality" scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.
The event at the New Museum is the premiere of Case, which will also be performed at a small outdoor community theater in rural Missouri in summer 2010. The New York production of Case will feature many of the ten cast members from the upcoming Midwest event, such as political activist (and notorious local hell-raiser) Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, who stars as the main character Henry Dorsett Case, a drug addict and computer hacker hired to execute an impossible cyber crime. Case will also feature Brooklyn-based performance artist Sto as Lupus Yonderboy, leader of the techno-anarchist gang the Panther Moderns, and the actress Sasha Grey as the street samurai Molly. The script has been prepared by the writer Brandon Stosuy, with sound design by Peter Segerstrom, and graphic props by Breanne Trammell.