NEW YORK.- The Harvey Theater will present on October 14 the play Bobrauschenbergamerica. This is a new theatre piece by SITI Company, with text by Charles L. Mee, directed by Anne Bogart. It’s described as an exuberant homage to visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. It has no traditional narrative structure, but instead is a series of vignettes inspired by Rauschenberg’s life that can also be seen as live versions of his artistic work. Traveling through time, the play takes us from Rauschenberg’s childhood home to a New York cafe to the open road in a colorful patchwork of people and places, music and dancing, love stories and picnics, business schemes and shootings, chicken jokes and golfing. Mee’s text includes writing by Rauschenberg himself, along with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Walt Whitman, and Merce Cunningham.

The play closes on October 18, 2003. In collaboration with director Anne Bogart (War of the Worlds, 2000 Next Wave) and SITI Company, Mee takes us on a wild road trip through both the light and dark sides of our American landscape in a play that Robert Rauschenberg might have conceived if he had been a playwright instead of a painter: a collage of people and places and music and dancing, of love stories and picnics and business schemes and violent shootings and chicken jokes, and of the sheer exhilaration—and anxiety—of living in a country where people make up their lives as they go. Costumes and set design by James Schuette

"Everybody today is a Rauschenbergian, whether they know it or not….Rauschenberg is who we would like to be as Americans at our best, with this spirit of egalitarianism and openness to life."
-Charles L. Mee

"Isn’t it something how he can see the beauty in almost anything!" A mother’s loving, and stunningly astute words define both the theme and subject of bobrauschenbergamerica, a spirited tribute to one of America’s greatest living artists by Charles L. Mee, whose Obie Award-winning Big Love (2001 Next Wave), put a modern-day spin on Greek tragedy.