The Pearl

The Pearl is a multidisciplinary solo performance, integrating film noir and sci-fi B film aesthetic within the conventions of meta-theatre. The driving story is autoethnographic narrative and speaks to both the mourning process and the reconstitution of self post-trauma. In 2015, Vinitski Mooney discovered a briefcase containing substantial medical and legal records pointing towards severe medical malpractice experienced by her late father on the part of his presiding physicians. This live and filmed performance is a reclamation of her father’s narrative and her dramatized existential response. As auteur, Vinitski Mooney embarks on a heightened research-creation methodology, melding the contemplative with the dramaturgical towards a final project integrating original performance, direction, dramaturgy, and writing, as well as intermedial design. To this end, dramaturgical focus included archive-led research and the friction between the live and filmed event. More specifically, Vinitski Mooney is concerned with the function of staged memory from a narrative, spatial, and kinetic lens, and how repetition and the surreal dramaturgically inform a play about mourning, loss, and dementia. The Pearl is a play about devastation and redemption, and seeks to be as equally haunting as it is provocative.