MUSEUM 2040

It's 2040. The United States is still recovering from a devastating yet oddly familiar event that nobody saw coming. Out of the ashes of the tragedy rises a memorial museum—The National Museum of American Reconciliation—dedicated to preserving the memories of the day when everything changed.

MUSEUM 2040 is an immersive theater piece that memorializes and explains a series of national...
It's 2040. The United States is still recovering from a devastating yet oddly familiar event that nobody saw coming. Out of the ashes of the tragedy rises a memorial museum—The National Museum of American Reconciliation—dedicated to preserving the memories of the day when everything changed.

MUSEUM 2040 is an immersive theater piece that memorializes and explains a series of national uprisings and protests that were figuratively—and literally—ignited by an act of political terrorism. Part performance piece, part exhibit, MUSEUM 2040 asks us to consider the politics of memory and national identity.
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MUSEUM 2040

Recommended by

  • Ian Thal:
    6 Mar. 2020
    In “Museum 2040” Calarco explores just one possible way the divides in American society could rupture in a speculative history that imagines developments in both American politics and pop-culture over the next twenty years while reminding us just how bizarre the events of the last twenty years have been. The immersive nature of the event makes us consider that we do not always understand the significance of present as we live through it, but also how significance is subject to debate or irreconcilable differences. The recent past can be an open wound — and so is the future.
  • Paul Donnelly:
    15 Feb. 2019
    Equal parts engrossing and unsettling (in the best possible way), this play offers a deliberately incomplete portrait of a single day of national horror and all the dreadful days that followed. It is mercifully non prescriptive and the richer for the gaps and inconsistencies that the viewer must try to fill and decipher. It even manages the feat of humanizing a bigot without justifying or rationalizing her bigotry. All in all a surprisingly complex, nearly sprawling work presented in a spare, tight frame.
  • Tristan B Willis:
    5 Jul. 2018
    Our National Museum... asks what truths are uncovered and deliberately hidden or softened in the curation of our national stories in museums. Like many of America's history, the instigating massacre that inspires this museum is born of our nation itself, a self-caused problem reflective of the many times America has harmed itself on its path to destroy others. The dog display (and uncomfortable call out) is perfect, as is setting the play in an immersive museum/environment. Calarco also explores an eerie example of how, especially for the marginalized, aligning ourselves with people in power will not protect us.

Development History

  • Workshop
    ,
    The Welders
    ,
    2016

Production History