Graphomania - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times.  "…be sure to catch ‘Graphomania,’ the riveting hourlong final production of unique, 17-year-old company,  Plasticene. Playing through April 1 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division, it is a brainy, wholly mesmerizing exploration of our high-security, surveillance-ridden world, featuring superb performances by Mark Comiskey, Julia Neary, Brian Shaw"

"Graphomania" - Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader 3/22/12.  "Since exploding onto the Chicago performance scene in 1995, Plasticene has presented 15 fevered, disjointed physical theater pieces that hovered tantalizingly on the brink of intelligibility.  Fittingly their final piece, an hour-long, poker-faced paranoid fantasy, is all about making sense of senselessness. A trio of overzealous, befuddled intelligence officials work overtime to turn  disconnected, meaningless surveillance reports of a young couple into a coherent national security threat. For the first half director Dexter Bullard stages some of the simplest, most evocative images in the company’s history. The actors perform a menacing ballet  just by rolling enormous chalkboards around the space. In the second half things grow increasingly and uncharacteristically literal, deciphering many of the mysteries that give the work its intrigue".

Plasticene: GRAPHOMANIA. - Theater Listing, TimeOut Chicago 3/22/12.  "Plasticene's 17-year run of experimental physical-theater ends with two weeks downstairs at the Chopin. Judging from past productions, GRAPHOMANIAx will be best suited for those who don't mind receiving their interdisciplinary performance with some assembly required. Cocreated and performed by  Julia Neary and veteran Plasticenesters Mark Comiskey and Brian Shaw, plus a team of sound and video specialists".

GRAPHOMANIA - Lauren Whalen, www.ChicagoTheaterBeat.com.  "In a dark, dusty studio space, a collective says good-bye. GRAPHOMANIA is the final production of Plasticene, who have collaborated on experimental,
avant-garde and physical theatre in Chicago since 1995. The company, and its mission, will continue to exist, but will no longer create new performance work. As a farewell to the city, GRAPHOMANIA is short but sweet,
odd but captivating, a testament to the powerful marriage of live theatre, multimedia and a healthy dose of paranoia.

In the not too distant future, three employees (Mark Comiskey, Julia Neary and Brian Shaw) are on a mission. Clad in mute tones and sworn to loyalty, they must put their heads together – shredding all relevant documents along the way – to trace the movements of one encounter involving three people on November 17, 2011. Through frantic but precise chalkboard scribbling, we learn this: a young man got off the subway and met a woman. They had an animated conversation at a café, during which a piece of paper changed hands. Later, a man joined them on a park bench. Movements were traced. Video footage exists. But what really happened? And why does it matter?

In its 50-minute running time, GRAPHOMANIA asks as many spectators rapid-fire questions as it answers. Not everything is resolved, and spectators are left wondering and worrying – which can be frustrating to audience members, but isn’t necessarily a negative thing. Art is supposed to make people think, draw their own conclusions and apply tenets of the work to their own lives. Seeing a show shouldn’t be a passive  process but an interactive one, and GRAPHOMANIA illustrates that concept to the hilt.

In keeping with Plasticene’s collaborative mission, GRAPHOMANIA doesn’t have a director per se, and occasionally the production lacks focus. However, the collective effect mostly works – there are many well-executed ideas at play. The main set pieces are three rolling blackboards, which the characters motor around the stage, duck underneath and scratch upon with chalk to create magnificently precise diagrams and transcribe lovely words. Eric Leonardson’s sound design is at once naturalistic and apocalyptically creepy, incorporating live voiceover of a mysterious man in charge. The impressively physical cast has fantastic chemistry, working as a three-headed, barely-human unit one moment and distinguishing their characters’ unique personalities – with something as small as a piece of gum – the next. Comiskey is all angles and sharp words, deeply committed to his
 mission and trying his best to conceal any lingering doubt or worse, exposed evidence. Shaw stumbles through his tasks, hoping -to earn an A for effort but always coming up short. And in the seconds between, Neary attempts awkward banter with her colleagues in a way that’s very endearing and just barely masks a need for human connection.

GRAPHOMANIA represents the best possible results of performers at play: an intriguingly ambiguous story that experiments with shadow, light, sound and movement both figurative and literal. If there’s a way to brightly  portray a bleak theatre, Plasticene pulls it off. Fare thee well, experimental company. We will miss your imagination".
 

From Plasticene - We live in grapho-maniacal times. Our Information Age is saturated with data, but has our ability to record and store data leapt beyond our ability to make sense of the information we gather?

Watch Plasticene’s renowned physical performers collect, record, decode, interpret and process information in a struggle to form a narrative out of conflicting streams of data. Plasticene brings its physical, sonic and visual resources to the stage, with each performer striving for coherence as the volume of data threatens to overwhelm them.