FROM CEC AND GWEN:

We listen to a lot of your mass media. Sometimes it gets a wee bit fuzzy on our equipment as we travel in and out of the folds of time and space, but one thing is certain, it is getting LOUDER and more BELLICOSE. This year, in an effort to understand why you all seem so cranky and so divided, we are running “CECILY AND GWENDOLYN’S FANTASTICAL AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL INQUISITORIAL PROBE (and world domination tour, 2012.)”   We are beginning the first of what we hope will be several, cross-country field studies.  In 2012, we will visit Phoenix, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Boulder, (possibly New Orleans) and our base-camp while on earth, Philadelphia, to study what makes each of your communities, SINGULAR and what makes you all SINGULARLY AMERICAN.

       The Fantastical...is an ongoing, ever-evolving, audience-interactive, improvisational theater/social science experiment.

  Cecily Marlborough and Gwendolyn Hamm, time-traveling Victorian social anthropologists on a mission to earn their rightful membership to The Royal Geographic Society. gather missing data on 21st Century cultures in order to finish their sure-to-be-definitive work on all human cultures throughout time entitled- “The  compleat history of all human cultures throughout time- from nascent tool makers to the post-modern architects of their self-inflicted and seemingly inevitable, doom.”

   To gather this data, Cecily and Gwendolyn run various "Fantasticals"- anthropological field studies framed as "audience-interactive theater” where  willingly gathered test subjects-audiences enjoy tea, biscuits as the focus of an empirical and interactive examination of our unexamined, every day lives.  As 'time-travelers' and 'scientists', Cec and Gwen turn their own naive, clinical, slightly wacky, Victorian lens on our habits, rituals and belief systems.  Through the completely improvised, playroom format, “The Fantastical” generates discoveries, conversations, and instant community in a room initially filled with strangers.