Related to his successful plays Ecco Porco, The Shaggy Dog Animation, Prelude, and Epidog, La Divina Caricatura is the first two parts of a trilogy of fiction that Breuer describes as "a loose sendup of Dante, with an Inferno, a Purgatorio, and a Paradisio. But instead of being sequential, they are intercut. And the main characters each have his own realm—the dog is in hell, the pig is in purgatory, and the ant (who will figure in part 3) . . . is in heaven."
As The New York Times described La Divina Caricatura is "a comic spectacle . . . an acid-trip collage of philosophy, mythology, corny jokes, and lyric poetry." But the chaotic structure of the work definitely creates an energy that is at once hilariously funny and, if not tragic, animated by the pathos of living at the beginning of a century which at times appears heading toward terror.
Lee Breuer is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Mabou Mines.