About the Project
It is 1932. Circuses are folding across the United States: a manic-depressive, socially-isolated, racially-torn America in dire need of joy.
A Pierrot clown with a revolver stands in the middle of an abandoned circus ground. It is Petey “Loony” DeLune, a Creole lapsed Catholic from New Orleans with a monastic devotion to the Big Top and an alienating addiction to liquor and cocaine. Desperate for contrition after a decade of hiding a terrible truth, he speaks for the first time since his flight from home and confesses the memories, mistakes and misdeeds that drove him away from the Crescent City as an exile and into the circus as a penitent and devotee to the sacred art of clowning.
In this one-man musical, Loony describes his mischievous childhood, the friendship with a Black youth that defined him, the fateful tragedy that cut his childhood short and his own culpability in the unspeakable crime. Weaving in reflections on the saintly role of clowns in society, and on the question of sainthood as a whole, he ends his life with the question: after all the laughter he’s given, will that be enough?
Production Team
