Karen Finley: The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery

Wickedly funny… Ms. Finley knows anger; she also knows entertainment.” —The New York Times

“[Finley’s] provocations resonate with surprising power.”
—New York Theater

“Unicorn is a rare beast indeed, a new way to consider the BDSM paradigm of the American body politic.”
—Time Out New York

Widely hailed as the high priestess of performance art, Karen Finley confronts the absurdity of contemporary politics and society in an incisive, hilarious and bedazzling new work she describes as “a psycho-sexual portrayal of our time … exposing the Shakespearean dynamic of what we are living through.” Her rave-reviewed solo performance confronts issues of citizenship, abuse of power, and gender disparity, while poeticizing magical beings, aggressive thankfulness, collective intimacy and international trauma. Finley fantasizes a unicorn that morphs into Hillary-like and Donald-like beings, as her poetic text prompts jolts of intuition, analysis, and resistance. But Unicorn goes beyond politics—Theater Times gleefully calls it a “wildly zig-zagging oxymoronical burlesque about how we all desire that which we can never have.”