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.
Quantum Theatre 
We had a great time seeing “All the Names.” I was happy to be able to explore the space a bit, too. I have recommended the show to several of my friends.
Thanks,
Matt
It was fabulous, even before the lambs (which almost stole the show)
I enjoyed it very much! Being in the play instead of watching from a distance made it such a different experience. The spaces in the former library also added so much to the experience. As an artist who has done installations and environments, I admired the sets and elements.
I was also grateful to have the opportunity to see it gratis, at the community day. Thank you for a fascinating and enjoyable evening!
fascinating, continually inventive.
I liked the production itself and the idea of “translating” the novel to the stage and the acting. However, I found being a spectator a little too strenuous. If I wanted a workout, I would go to the gym. As my knees get older, all the up and down and about and around is too much and there were not enough places to sit at intermission
I really knew very little about what to expect when I came to see ALL THE NAMES, but I was thoroughly delighted with what I saw. All four actors did compelling and lovely work; and visually the play was very striking. I’m not sure I could necessarily pin down the meaning of the piece- but that never bothers me. I’m willing to allow a play or piece of art take it’s time in settling through me in order for its meaning to become clear. Often times, when I watch a film by David Lynch, for example, I have no idea where I’ve been dropped off; but I sure did enjoy the ride there! I felt much the same about ALL THE NAMES. I have a few intellectual impressions that I walked away with, and I definitely have a feeling I walked away with. And I have tons of images that will be pondering for quite a while. That’s a pretty good thing to come away from a production with.
Loved the space. (TAMARA would work well in that space for a remount….!) I thought it was used very well, and certainly seemed audience friendly for those who didn’t want to go up and down stairs.
Now I’ll have to track down the novel.
Being a huge fan of Saramago’s work, I was thrilled to see a performance that oozed the essence of the book! The four actors were perfect, their choices fitting, the set evocative, the sounds hauntingly correct. I was emmersed in a world that belonged to Saramago.
Moving from space to space is comfortable. Two of the scenes start before we are all transitioned but I’m not sure that matters.
Who is the woman with the tech stuff, headphones et al, sittin in the balcony area, who is speaking all the time? She is a little annoying.
Loved this play. It was brilliant. The sound and visual effects–wow. Just pure genius. I really thought the desk was a giant iPad, and the ceiling! So true! And so cool. The actors were brilliant, perfectly cast. The only thing that was possibly too good were the lambs, because everyone was so in love with them that it was difficult to tear ourselves away and listen to the actors. As in all thins Quantum, I will be thinking about the experience for days still. Looking forward to it! Also, I loved being able to look down into the stage for a changes it really gave a feeling of being part of the omnipresent, omniscient Central Ministry watching the furious yet curiously repressed activity of the people belonging to it. Lots and lots of parallels to think about with that one, helped along with all the allusion to Araiadne’s thread and the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth! Yet so much compassion and tenderness was evident in the play as well…….Now see what you’ve done, Quantum? I’ll be going on for days like this. Thanks so much! No, truly. Thanks so much for all you do and offer. Enormous efforts and great, great talent and training and inspiration and daring = Quantum. Pittsburgh comes alive when you’re around! And many thanks to the actors. Brilliant work well done! Thrilled to have been able to add my name to the wall alongside All the Names!
I had just read the book prior to the show & couldn’t figure out how it could possibly become a play, but Karla worked her magic. I thought Quantam’s adaptation was brilliant. I truly enjoyed every aspect of it (the set, the physical movement from room to room, the dual character approach to Jose, the visual representation of Ariadne’s thread, etc.). I have enjoyed this season of Quantum so much–my favorite so far, hands down. Also, I am a big fan of the interactive shows you have staged: moving from room to room is engaging and interesting. Please continue to do more of that!
The acting was fantastic- the set & scenic design worked well & I could actually hear everything which is not always the case, so all in all it was a good experience for me.
I was seriously impressed by the creativity involved with designing the set. There were 2 major rooms and two side rooms that were incredible and sparked imagination throughout. The actors were of course stellar and the performance was captivating. The staff showed us a lovely time and we couldn’t have had more fun.
The piece was, and should be, an arduous journey both physically and psychologically. At the end I thought of Jung’s Red Book and the discussion about it by James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani entitled, “Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book”. On the book cover is a quote from the Red Book, “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” It is through the dead that the central character finds love. By the way, that actor was inspiring. His transformation from a Kafka Clerk to a person who felt deeply, who became humanized through his search which ended with the dead, who quested, suffered, and became deeply human was deeply affecting to me. And the implication that his quest for her identity which led him to falsely represent himself as an official agent of an investigation may have been a threat that led to the unknown woman’s suicide. This creates a layer of irony that resonates with classic Greek tragedy. Which makes me think of the red threads that carry us through the chamber of the dead and those mythic allusions. There is so much to think about and so much to feel through in this work. Thank you and all the collaborators for daring to take this on and bringing us to another place. So many implications: the cemetery of the suicides with the good shepherd and the “sacrificial lambs”? Lamb of God? Are the suicides the sacrificial tokens for our “sins”? How ironic that the scene is both faux sylvan and in a decaying, abandoned room.
It is the merging of the archives [archetypes?] of the living and the dead that brings me back to Jung’s journey as it evolved through the long making of the Red Book – the long making of his life. The dead are our most crucial “forgottens” because they are a crucial part of our living. From dust to dust, and so we are all conjoined.
We talked about the intriguing environment that you created, the superb acting so beautifully both restrained and passionate, and I realized why the double Señor was a great decision for it creates another layer of reaction and another possibility of interaction as well. Mark was the “observer” that we all carry with us and which make deeper consciousness possible.
Ever onward!
Ah, thank you for this. So many great insights here! The play goes on and on!
And thank YOU, Kate.
Great show, but the aggressive woman directing traffic was quite a distraction. Took us completely out of the wonderful mood of the play, more than the moving from room to room, which we didn’t mind.
I want to point out a moment that I thought was particularly clever. Jose riding on the bus and how that was represented with media was such a beautiful moment. I thought it was a great idea to have the projection follow the actor as he traveled around the room. I felt as if we had changed location entirely even though we were still in the same room.
Quantum does it again! The venue and so much care in creating the sets made this immersion theatre truly wonderful, not to mention the choice of an interesting “theme” and excellent acting.
Great show, great experience, great venue. A thoughtfully woven interplay of craft: writing, staging, set design, acting, video design, sound design. Seriously: congratulations to all involved. It’s a wonderful gift to your audience Thank you.
In commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day on the CMU campus today, I was part of a day-long reading of names of young people who were victims of the Holocaust. As I spoke into the microphone and read each person’s name, age, and place of death, I couldn’t help but think about “All The Names”, having just seen it a few days ago. The experience of the play is definitely staying with me because of the outstanding acting, creative staging, and compelling message. Congratulations and thank you to Karla and the entire team that made this happen!
The play has a subtle message which is cleverly delivered by skillful acting. I did not find the experience of moving from place to place during the play effective, however. Tamara had a very logical purpose to the many settings which required the audience to move about. This play did not.
Truly enjoyed the overall experience and the play’s intensely serious but often humorous reflections on fact, fiction, history, memory, loneliness,obsession, wishful thinking and much more. Also thoroughly enjoyed traipsing up and down and in and out of the several rooms and viewing spots. As with Tamara, this way of seeing/participating in a play is new and exciting. A terrifically imaginative and complex venture from start to finish.
At least equally, I thought that the acting per se was simply fabulous — up with the best I’ve ever seen close-up. How lucky we are to have actors of this quality in Quantum performances.
All the Names was a beautiful, thought-provoking performance. All the many things that Quantum does so well were on display and firing on all cylinders. Congratulations to the “collaborators,” actors, and crew!
The script and conception of the piece were absolutely brilliant with equal parts of Borges, Kafka, and the Mattress Factory. The blurring of the boundaries between drama, installation art, video and live performance modalities, and participatory “happenings” was exciting. The acting was stellar. I particularly liked the schizophrenia in having two actors simultaneously represent the same person. The physical space of the former Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny was almost another actor, it was so integral to the story-telling. There was a palpable sense of surprise and discovery and wonder in moving to the different rooms — the surreal tilted table/floor, the wind tunnel, and the cemetery with (spoiler alert!) the frisky goats.
The play explored so many of the many facets of what a name is and what it signifies to different people and what the bearer of that name means to that person and others. It is not just a bunch of letters or is it?
I really liked how Quantom used the building and I loved the soup treat!
At one point in the performance Jose says something like, “Since I’m going to have to be here anyway, I might as well do something.” At times I wondered if this line was the production’s motto. The room changes were essential and integral to Tamara, and Brahmani was a high-energy tour de force. High-energy is not a term I’d apply to this Kafkaesque tale, which could perfectly well have been staged in one space. Was hustling the audience about from room to room a slightly gimmicky way of compensating for the lack of theatrical dynamism in a script derived from a novel where that issue may not exist? I was grateful for the exposure to Saramago but am not sure I’ll run out and read the book. I might have been more grateful with a chance to discuss the performance afterwards. In a glitch that was probably just my forgetfulness I thought we had subscribed to the complete “Quantum-on-the-Couch” series, a phrase that appears on our paperwork for April 25th’s Saturday performance; thus we were surprised when this show was not followed by psychoanalytic discussion unlike our performances of Tamara and Brahmani, and afterwards a program-collector averred that those discussions were Sunday events. Though we were not personally challenged physically, we could see that some older folk were. Quantum needs to be upfront with audiences about this potential issue when selling subscription tickets to such productions. Fortunately I foresaw the lack of sufficient chairs during intermission and made a beeline to reserve two before picking up soup; otherwise I would have been annoyed. If there was enough space for the separate scene with the cutesy sheep (I’m sure its comically absurd staging can be defended though perhaps it risked jocularly undermining one of the somber story’s central points), could not space have been found for extra chairs during intermission, if necessary by using the lobby?
An absolutely wonderful and essential play. The acting was impassioned and superb, while the set was dream-like, unexpectedly mystical in its raw simplicity, and unforgettable.
The play was filled with wisdom and existential insight, embodied in characters longing for meaning and connectivity to what matters; not the official, rule-bound mundane but the enlivened, imagined, emotive human realm. The realm that not only makes rules and categories of classification, but also has the capacity for breaking such structures and boundaries, thereby allowing for the possibility of beautiful ties to others in their vulnerable aloneness.
Among the many things I will take and recollect from this performance: what is curative is connection to others in the broadest sense, including recognition of the dissolved boundary between living and dead. Indeed, what seems to have saved the life of the living– in this instance, the lead character– was a woman who, at the time of telling, was among the dead, but whose story and importance provided the necessary meaning to affirm life.
I’m grateful this play was performed in Pittsburgh, and applaud the entire cast and crew, all of whom merit a standing ovation.
“Kafkaesque”, yes — but really more about a quest. An obsession, perhaps — but one worth pursuing, because from his soulless place of work Senhor Jose finally has a chance to reach out to someone, or something, real. Having worked in the federal bureaucracy I can appreciate this need for human contact outside those four gray walls — the need to turn paper into flesh-and-blood people. Jose’s life is absurd in the existential sense, and remains so… but there was that one point of light, and maybe this is all that most of us can hope for. Ironically, the most “real” person in the play is the one never seen or heard. But this is also a reflection of our existential state — the “real” is forever somewhere else, at another time. The “here and now” is dream-like, not quite real, but inescapable. As to the acting — superb! And perfect casting. James Fitzgerald as the chronically put-upon, never-quite-healthy cog in a very large machine… and Mark Thompson as his doppelganger or shadow, with all of that amazing body language and suppleness of movement and facial expression. And as to the venue, what could be better than the vastness of an abandoned library with varied spaces, stairways, corridors? It put me in mind of Orson Welles’ production of “The Trial”. Overall, a stunning and memorable production.