Explore the things we cannot help but do, feel, and say:

Sentenced to this Vessel

Sentenced to this Vessel

Ticket Info

Regular

$35.21

Student

$19.21

Children 15 and under

$15

The Theater at St. Jean

150 East 76th Street

New York, NY 10021

Oct 30, 2021

Saturday, 3:00 PM

Oct 30, 2021

Saturday, 7:00 PM

Find out more
Venue Website

Sentenced to this Vessel
此生
Прикованный к себе

A new play created by Anzi DeBenedetto and Nate Sassoon, with a full original sound track. Producer and Assistant Director: Catrin Ody.

Each show runs between 100 and 110 minutes including intermission. The show is suggested for ages 13+, younger children will be admitted with an adult at parental discretion. Some strong language.
Tickets for children under 15 (inclusive), $15.00. Please email operalily@gmail.com with requests for children’s tickets. Limited number of children’s discounted tickets.

The Show
演出介绍
шоу

Sentenced to this Vessel strives to explore the things we cannot help but do, feel, and say. When these behaviors are examined through the lens of performers, the lines between off and on-stage start to blur. To love, to risk, to put yourself out there— this is what it means to live. We have no choice but to invite you all: point and laugh at us, with us. Watch us watch you live and perform.

Two friends Anzi and Nate write and compose a play, intending to clarify where performance ends and reality begins. Intervened by Music who has agency, things get sticky, the narrative starts to crumble, and they must fight to piece everything together before the ending. A story of two ones becoming a two.

They start the story by emphasizing that although people see performance as fake, it's actually a deeply genuine thing that everyone does. When they take their discussion to a bar, the surrounding music starts to react to their conversation. Evidently, the music is more than it appears to be.

Nate disappears after the intermission, and Anzi must track him down to bring the play to an end. While Anzi laments the dissolution of his script, Nate works with the music to create a new and improved finale. In the final vignette, the two engage in a strange, yet poignant dialectic while the music brings everything to a stunning conclusion.

The Making
制作
Процесс создания

Although this is Nate and Anzi’s first large-scale artistic collaboration, the ideas behind Sentenced to this Vessel have been on their individual radars for several years. Both have, at times, felt confined by academia, especially with regards to the structuralizing of the creative process. Now in post-graduate life, they’ve bunkered down in Poconos, Pennsylvania to explore what it means - and how it feels - to perform and create. They are honored to finally combine their backgrounds in music and drama to produce a work that, they hope, will be equally insightful and entertaining. According to them, the line between performance and reality is not as definitive as it often seems; Sentenced to this Vessel’s goal is to prove this thesis.

The play involves significant music and multimedia. Rather than presenting the story as a traditional two-man play, the play showcases various auxiliary characters and incorporates music as an entity with agency to create the impression of a larger universe.

About the Artists
演职人员
Об артистах

Anzi DeBenedetto graduated from NYU Tisch with a BFA in Drama. He was born in New York City, lived in Shanghai, and went to Phillips Exeter Academy. With theater training from the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School and film training from Stonestreet Studios, he has appeared in Will Eno’s “Thom Pain: Based on Nothing”, CBS’s “FBI”, and voiceover campaigns for Ubisoft and The Edge. He is very excited to share Sentenced to this Vessel, a project he wrote, directed, and is acting alongside with Nate Sassoon. He also speaks Chinese, is learning Italian, and does Yoga. Commercial representation: Buchwald.

Nate Sassoon graduated from the University of Oxford with a BA in Music. Nate was born in New York City and went to Phillips Exeter Academy. He is a classical pianist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer/music producer who creates and performs music in a wide variety of genres. In 2020, he released two albums, Umba and Cold Shadows and Warm Rays, which included songs influenced by dubstep, progressive metal, synthwave, plainchant, jazz, electro house, 18th century classical music, hip hop, noise, among other genres. His latest choral piece “The Windows” was premiered in March 2021 by the Exeter College Chapel Choir at Oxford. Nate also played Keys/Keytar in the Oxford based band Dot’s Funk Odyssey. He has done many concerts of spontaneous classical piano improvisation in the US and in Russia. He is very excited to share Sentenced to this Vessel, a project he composed, directed, and is acting alongside with Anzi DeBenedetto. Nate speaks Russian. The two met in kindergarten and reunited in high school. This is their first artistic collaboration.

Catrin Ody, the Producer and Assistant Director, was born and raised in London moving to New York to study Theatre, Producing and Film at NYU Tisch. She started producing for feature films in her junior year as an Associate Producer at BOTEP alongside her acting training. Now she directs, produces, and acts for film and theatre. She also co-hosts a comedy podcast called “Sleeping With Your Friends”. She considers herself an artist above all.

Copyright © Sentenced to this Vessel, 2021. Design by Owen Rossi-Keen.