Mahinerator + The Barbarians

To engage with Lieblich’s plays is to become obsessed with how language works, how it works on us, and how we use it to work on others. —Thinking Theater NYC

In Mahinerator, an ambitious bureaucrat, speaking in a quasi-English pseudolect, tells his greatliest life story; a story of the banalation of the evilwise, of vacuumic compressulated ecocide.

The Barbarians is a loggorheic encyclopedic rambunctious gollywompus of a play concerning speech acts, political power, fractal geometry, eusociality, theater, nonsense, aircraft carriers, cell phone networks, Bifröst, My Heart Will Go On, semiotics, pyramids, and picturesque American normalcy.

A composer of language’s skewed longings, these plays by Jerry Lieblich torque and tickle our grammars, taking these jangly, tangling systems as occasions for probing the political structures through which we participate in our and others’ demise.

Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands between theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Their plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La MaMa), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Clubbed Thumb—Critic’s Pick: NY Times, TimeOut NY), Tongue Depressor (The Public Theatre / Brooklyn College), Nostalgia is a Mild Form of Grief (developed with Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater, Page 73), Ghost Stories (Cloud City—Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), Your Hair Looked Great (Abrons Arts Center), and A Discourse on the Method… (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, NACL, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and UCROSS, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Yiddishkayt. They have received an EST/Sloan Commission, the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award (twice), and a Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. They are an alum of the Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, Page 73's I-73 Writer's Group, and Pipeline Theater’s Playlab group. BA: Yale, Philosophy; MFA: Brooklyn College (Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, chief instigators).