The butler: "I could not possibly drop the platter; I will not drop the platter, these are my two hands holding the platter-no problem. I have been in service since time began. Take two steps back.
Freeze. At ease."
A.W.O.L. is the third collaboration between the director, Marion Schoevaert, and the leading contemporary French poet, Olivier Cadiot. Like The Unknown Guest and Colonel of Fools (Le Colonel des Zouaves) before it, A.W.O.L. is based on Cadiot's funny and refreshingly un-ironic novel, Le Colonel des Zouaves, about a butler driven mad by his work. This “Americanized” production begins on the streets of downtown NYC as a beggar-poet begins his transformation from homeless to manservant to spy to colonel to American hero, witnessed, even taunted, by an operatic chorus of anonymous Wall Street businessmen. It is the rise to power of a crazy man in a world gone mad. A.W.O.L. is a hymn to class struggle, a mini-opera for loneliness, and the symphony of a military regiment.