WHAT IS TAMARA THE PLAY?

In TAMARA, Los Angeles' longest-running play, a dozen characters unfold their stories before a walking, sometimes running audience. Tamara enacts a true story taken from the diary of Aelis Mazoyer. It is Italy, January 10, 1927, in the era of Mussolini. Gabriele d'Annunzio, a poet, patriot, womanizer, and revolutionary who is exceedingly popular with the people, is under virtual house arrest. Tamara, an expatriate Polish beauty, aristocrat, and aspiring artist, is summoned from Paris to paint d'Annunzio's portrait. Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (12! = 479,001,600). I applied this critical postmodern perspective by looking at Disney corporate narratives, contrasting official (hegemonic) and more (corporately) marginalized stories [Boje 1995 Academy of Management Journal].