Friday, April 23
Saturday, April 24
Sunday, April 25

Performance at 8 p.m. each night, followed by discussion at 10 p.m.

RSVP is required. Please email bartleby@canopycanopycanopy.com to reserve seats and receive ticket-purchase information.

"It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair." —Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener

"Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us 'throw away' the story once it has been consumed ('devoured'), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere)." —Roland Barthes, S/Z

New York-based theater collective Group Theory probes the psychosonic landscapes of Herman Melville's classic novella Bartleby, the Scrivener in an intimate chamber ritual that transforms the private act of reading into a communal encounter. A strange literary-theatrical hybrid, this Bartleby is a performed palimpsest of rereadings, a hyper-lucid window onto a famously difficult text in all its haunting ambiguity and violent comedy. Followed by drinks and conversation with invited respondents, including Paul Chan, Edwin Frank, Lynne Tillman, Abha Dawesar, John Bryant, Vivian Gornick, Joseph McElroy, Alice Boone, Graham Parker, Molly Springfield, McKenzie Wark, and Greg Wayne.

Conceived and directed by Ben Vershbow
Created with the ensemble: Jeremy Beck, Daniel Larlham, and Craig Pattison
Designed by Ben Vershbow and Dorit Avganim

Download the event program.

A special, print-on-demand edition of Bartleby, the Scrivener, designed by Rebecca Gimenez , is available from Lulu.

Friday, April 23

Paul Chan (artist, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Sade for Sade's sake), Edwin Frank (editorial director, New York Review Books), Lynne Tillman (novelist and critic; author of American Genius, a Comedy and Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanette Watson; fiction editor of Fence magazine)

Moderated by Abha Dawesar (novelist, Family Values, That Summer, Babyji)

Saturday, April 24

John Bryant (professor of English, Hofstra University; author of The Fluid Text; editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies), Vivian Gornick (critic and memoirist; author of Fierce Attachments, The Situation and the Story, The Men in My Life), Joseph McElroy (novelist, A Smuggler's Bible, Women and Men, Actress in the House)

Moderated by Alice Boone (PhD candidate in English and comparative literature, Columbia University; editor of the New York Public Library's Candide 2.0)

Sunday, April 25

Graham Parker (artist; author of Fair Use [notes from spam]), Molly Springfield (artist; author of "Inside the Mundaneum"), McKenzie Wark (professor of culture and media, the New School; author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory)

Moderated by Greg Wayne (PhD candidate in neurobiology, Columbia University)

Group Theory is a new New York–based theater company founded by Ben Vershbow and Dorit Avganim. Before coming to 177 Livingston, Bartleby was premiered at IRT Theater, then performed at the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy and Brooklyn Social Therapy. Bartleby was in part inspired by Vershbow's work at the Institute for the Future of the Book and the New York Public Library.