)
His collaborative meditation on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” will make its American debut from Sept. 20-22 as a part of the fall season of NYU’s Skirball Center.
While “White Noise” is being billed as an adaptation, Fish said, “It’s a show that is very freely inspired by the novel.
“It’s more a conversation with the novel than an adaptation,” he added.
This freedom with the source material, which tells the story of a death-obsessed professor contending with an environmental disaster, is evident in the show’s script, which Fish devised by homing in on one of Delillo’s stylistic quirks: His use of lists. “What I did was I took everything that I thought was a list in the novel, and I had a kind of rule for myself for what that was, and that’s the text,” he said.
)
)
)
He will use these selections from the novel, which will be performed in a one-man show by Bruce McKenzie, in dialogue with a film that Fish made with Jim Findlay and 19 teenagers from Freiburg, Germany, where the piece received its premiere at the Theater Freiburg.
The film, Fish said, is a series of scenes that respond to the novel but “in a kind of slightly ‘off’ way, not a very direct or literal way.”
The Skirball season begins Sept. 6 with “BAD NEWS! i was there ...” a site-specific work by JoAnne Akalaitis that examines the character of “the messenger” in the works of playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare. The season also includes the world premieres of two Skirball commissions: “Underneath the Skin,” John Kelly’s solo dance theater piece about the life of Samuel Steward, a gay writer, scholar and tattoo artist (Oct. 11-12); and “The House of Forbidden Flowers,” a collaboration between choreographer Richard Move and director Ong Keng Sen inspired by the plays of Jean Genet (Nov. 15-16).
A full schedule is at nyuskirball.org. Tickets go on sale June 5.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.