The Marsh Presents Eliot Fintushel’s BAUDELAIRE: LOVE & LUST Wednesday, October 28, 2009

One Performance Only!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:30 pm on The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia Street @ 22nd Street in San Francisco.

Tickets are $10-15 Sliding Scale. To buy tickets call 1-800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org

Crystal balls levitate, scarves turn to snakes, and a golden octahedral box produces smoking censers and a holy grail as Fintushel performs poems from Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil” in French and English (including the banned poem "Les Bijoux.") The show also includes Fintushel playing the songs of Debussy live on the Etherwave Theremin, an instrument which, by interacting with an electromagnetic field, requires no physical contact.

The Baudelaire translations used in the play are by Fintushel who says he loves Baudelaire “because of his delicious contradictions. He is profoundly religious—his images are mainly drawn from Catholic ritual—and at the same time he is the bawdiest sensualist. His ecstasies come from the flesh and from the sky. Pure magic. The audience will be simultaneously illumined and debauched."

Eliot Fintushel is a veteran actor and physical performer with a background in mask theater, pantomime and improvisation. He won the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Performer award twice, then served for two decades as a program analyst for the NEA's Theater Panel.