We hope your experience at Quantum’s All the Names was a good one. Our staff and board are interested to hear what you think, and encourage you to talk with others as well, so we have initiated an online conversation you can join with fellow attendees. What did you like/dislike about the production? Was there something in particular that resonated with you? Something particularly confusing? Any comments or suggestions are greatly encouraged.
Leave your comment in the comment box below. Be sure to click the box that will notify you of responses to your comment. Some will come from Karla, and some (we hope) will come from other patrons. You’re a valued member of the Q-mmunity. We’re all hoping for greater understanding through the art that we experience.
We greatly appreciate your thoughts and look forward to continuing the conversation of All the Names… and of Quantum Theatre experiences to come, we hope there will be many more.
Step into the shoes of Senhor José in Quantum Theatre’s world premiere of All The Names, devised by Karla Boos, Chris Evans, Cindy Limauro, Barbara Luderowski, Sarah Pickett, Megan Monaghan Rivas, Joe Seamans, and Narelle Sissons. The show opens April 10 and runs through May 2 at the Original Carnegie Free Library in Allegheny Commons, adjacent to the New Hazlett Theater. Purchase TICKETS 
The space could not be more perfect. One of the country’s oldest library buildings, the Carnegie Free Library, which sits in the Allegheny Commons area of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood, was once a bustling cultural center. Seeing its patronage diminish as Allegheny City’s population fell and resources were diverted to other branches, the library closed after lightning hit the clock tower in 2006, its once-hallowed halls stripped of books and shelving and the card indexes of a century of history. But, at least for the run of All The Names, the ghosts of the stacks are back, stocked with the Central Registry’s records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths: the primary data of everyone in Saramago’s unnamed country; stocked, essentially, with all the names.
“Carnegie, when he had these things designed, he designed them for multiple uses,” says John Canning, vice president of the Allegheny City Society, a historical group dedicated to the legacy of North Side landmarks. “They often had music halls, lecture halls. They weren’t just libraries.”
Boos has been co-adapting the production with Mattress Factory founder Barbara Luderowski and a host of “co-devisers,” artists and designers who’ve not so much transformed the library as restored it, at least a version of itself, a version that feels at once fantastically overwhelming—the labyrinthine world of the Central Registry—while throwing the absences in the space into stark relief: you become acutely aware that this beautiful place once housed real books.
Brahman/i is a play about the spaces in between. Conflicting identities, transformations, trying on different skins until one finally feels like it fits. A play about the process of becoming, and an acknowledgement that that, more than anything, is what life is: the process, not the endgame. To become the title character of Quantum Theatre’s latest production, New York-based actor Sanjiv Jhaveri has to inhabit those between-spaces. It’s challenging, and Sanjiv is bringing his A game.
“We didn’t set out to be in a former church,” says Karla Boos, Quantum Theatre’s founder and artistic director. “But what could be better than a former church, a ‘transitioned’ place of spirituality. And we started riffing: it’s the Temple of Comedy. The ‘marquee’ outside is a church sign, with rotating jokes like the sermon announcements.”
But Mauk isn’t just creating a comedy club. There’s an invisible element at work in the design, an element you’ll feel as you enter. “No one should feel like an outsider in this space,” he says. “They should feel at home and entertained or intrigued by their surroundings. So much about the piece is just accepting someone as they are, how they feel in that moment,” and the club Mauk is building sets out to offer that same feeling of acceptance, where everyone, even someone like Brahman/i, can feel at home.
With Quantum Theatre, your experience is never the same twice. That goes double with John Shepard’s production of Tamara: not only can you follow a different character each time you see the show, you will also find a new menu—and a new wine—available each week of the run. With Tamara, Quantum not only dives into new territory with an immersive theatre experience, but also into providing both the dinner and the show: your whole night out, brought to you by Quantum Theatre and the amazing chefs of six great local restaurants.
Quantum Theatre 