Still a Quiet Afternoon

Written and Performed by Katie Mazzini & Gabriel Thom Pasculli

While the fires of Troy burn outside their window, an ancient and familiar couple faces off within the present moment’s epic call to action. Time unravels as the couple is swept up into reveries, melodramatic battles, and their own raging desire for affirmation in the midst of an end-of-days catastrophe. The piece is a comic and tender exploration of how we sometimes find grace and sometimes find strife in one another. And how we often miss the point.

Still a Quiet Afternoon is a mythic, musical tragicomedy about two people in their small apartment observing a multitude of apocalyptic events through their single window. Interweaving their personal narratives with historic events, songs, and poetic storytelling, Katie Mazzini (Her) and Gabriel Thom Pasculli (Him) investigate each character as the protagonist of their own life—and their inner movements as entire worlds—juxtaposed against an endlessly apocalyptic context.

The seeds of Still a Quiet Afternoon began in 2019 in a month-long collaboration between Walkabout’s Mazzini and Pasculli with Guilherme Kirchheim and Tara Ostiguy while they were at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. In 2019 work-in-progress presentations of the piece were made at Prop Thtr's Rhino Fest in Chicago and at the Hinterlands in Detroit. Collaborator and former Workcenter member Desiré Graham joined the team in 2022.

The development of the piece changed dramatically through the Covid-19 pandemic, though its themes have continued to grow more complex and more salient. The work takes a sharp look at the interpersonal and micro-melodramas of dealing with large-scale threats, while still offering some much needed breadth, humor, and perspective around the human condition.