One Yellow Rabbit & Wordfest Co-Present The First Bad Man

One Yellow Rabbit & Wordfest Co-Present The First Bad Man

A Pan Pan Theatre Production

MULTIPLE SHOW DATES: Jan. 30 to Feb. 2, 2025.
Click the "buy tickets" button to choose a performance time.

Not quite your mother's book club, this immersive theatre experience offers far more than just a literary discussion. 

Audience members will join a live performance featuring Dublin’s Pan Pan Theatre, based on a reading of The First Bad Man, a novel by Miranda July. 

Grab a seat and settle in as Kitty Blennerhasset, John Benno, Rose McVittie, and Freya Golden explore the first book featured in their book club, along with the characters of Miranda July’s debut novel. This production of The First Bad Man is a humourous, thoughtful, and occasionally unsettling look at how we engage with others, drawing on the book's themes of loneliness and isolation.

Reviewed by The Observer as “heartbreakingly sad, thoughtful, disgusting and hilarious,” this performance will immerse you in a conversation that takes a journey you may not have expected.

Ticket price includes an advance copy of The First Bad Man (unlike other Wordfest shows, we highly encourage you to read it before the performance to fully engage in the experience). Ticket holders will be contacted starting in early December with further instructions on how to pick up their included book. 

Co-presented by One Yellow Rabbit & Wordfest, these five performances are part of the 2025 High Performance Rodeo, Jan. 14-Feb. 2. 

WHAT TO EXPECT

• 60-minute immersive performance
• Copy of The First Bad Man included with ticket
• Libations bar service with non-alcoholic options
• Wordfest Book & Merch Experience Space,
  featuring Miranda July's fabulous backlist

About Pan Pan Theatre

Pan Pan was founded in 1993 by Co-Artistic Directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn. The company has created 59 new theatre and performance pieces and toured worldwide, receiving multiple national and international awards. Pan Pan have toured extensively to prestigious venues and festivals around the world including BAM, Lincoln Centre, St Ann’s Warehouse, NCPA China, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney and Melbourne Festivals, the Barbican, and Hau Berlin.

Since its inception, Pan Pan has constantly examined and challenged the nature of its work and has resisted settling into well-tried formulas. Developing new performance ideas is at the centre of the company’s mission. All the works created are original, either through the writing (original plays) or through the totally unique expression of established writings. Pan Pan tries to approach theatre as an open form of expression and has developed an individual aesthetic that has grown from making performances in a host of different situations and conditions. Visit their website for more info.

About The First Bad Man

From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of no one belongs here more than you, comes a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny, so Miranda July. Readers will be astonished.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people’s babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women’s self-defense nonprofit where she works. She believes they’ve been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl’s bosses ask if their 21-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee—the selfish, cruel blond bombshell—who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual obsession and fierce maternal love, Miranda July’s first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic, and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.

Praise for The First Bad Man (novel)

“July’s work reminds us that the essential storytelling tool is voice. Hers is smart, funny, twisted, vulnerable, humane, and reassuring: a dazzling human consciousness speaking frankly and fondly and directly to you. If I ever start to doubt the power of language and intelligence, I only have to read a few lines of July to have my faith restored.” –George Saunders

“Miranda July’s ability to pervert norms while embracing what makes us normal is astounding. Writing in the first person with the frank, odd lilt of an utterly truthful character, she will make you laugh, cringe and recognize yourself in a woman you never planned to be. By the time July tackles motherhood, the book has become a bible. Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self. I know I am not alone.” –Lena Dunham

“Cheryl Glickman, Miranda July’s heroine in this unforgettable novel, is one of the most original, most confounding and strangely sympathetic characters in recent fiction. She narrates this very intimate epic that starts in a place of brittle, quirky, loneliness and progresses into a profoundly moving story of nontraditional love and commitment. This novel is almost impossible to put down, and confirms July as a novelist of the first order.” –Dave Eggers