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By Vinson Cunningham
Brooklyn Daily
It’s a play within a movie within a play.
As if Jacques Rivette’s 1969 film “L’Amour Fou” — which follows a film crew documenting a theater group during rehearsals — weren’t complicated enough, a Williamsburg stage adaptation of the same name is incorporating live video and projections to take the play to another level of complexity.
“It’s a movie about people rehearsing a play,” said Doris Mirescu, the director and designer of the show, which opens at the Brick on Valentine’s Day and runs through March 10. “Now we’re making a play about it.”
If Mirescu has her way, audience members will experience a radical new form of storytelling — and while they are at it, feel something, too.
“I would hope that they would experience some kind of emotion,” she said. “They’ll go on a journey on us that will surprise them, and get rid of any assumptions about where performance can lead them, and what performance can do.”
Central to the surprise is play’s use of video.
“We’re using live media and cameras — mixing film into theatre,” she said. “It plays with the original movie, but at the same time becomes very personal for my own quest, my own directorial search.”
This isn’t Mirescu’s first foray into Rivette’s filmography: she and the members of Dangerous Ground, her theatre company, presented a version of “Celine and Julie Go Boating” in Bushwick as part of last year’s undergroundzero festival.
They’ll continue their exploration of Rivette’s work all year at the Brick, following “L’Amour Fou” with another production of “Celine and Julie,” and completing the cycle with an adaptation of the epic “Out 1.”
“Rivette is one of the filmmakers I like the most,” Mirescu said. “He has an ability to play with narration and different dimensions — it’s an inspiration and a challenge.”
“L’Amour Fou” at the Brick Theater [579 Metropolitan Ave. at Lorimer Street in Williamsburg, (718) 285–3863, www.bricktheater.com]. From Feb. 14 to March 10, $18.