Animal Wisdom tickets

See Heather Christian's raucous New York Times Critic's Pick, now back off Broadway at Signature Theatre. First staged at the Bushwick Starr and now reimagined in a new production, Animal Wisdom plays this spring on 42nd Street at the The Pershing Square Signature Center.

In this "truly one-of-a-kind opus" (The New York Times), Heather talks to dead people, gets freaked out, and writes music. Animal Wisdom is a lo-fi, idiosyncratic, folk-blues requiem written from theoretical or actual (you decide) conversations with the dead. Animal Wisdom off Broadway is performed alongside half-remembered Methodist hymns from the 1800s, hyperbolized family mythologies, and community rituals of the ridiculous in the form of a gothic Catholic mass. How else can you address your soul?

Animal Wisdom is a unique musical offering created by sinners and science nerds and made for believers and non-believers alike. Vogue calls it a “powerful Southern gothic musical on mortality" and “a combination of requiem mass, séance, revival meeting, metaphysical lecture, rock concert, and autobiographical one-woman (plus band and choir) show.” Raving further, Vogue says the play is “stranger and deeper, more powerful and more haunting, than that description implies, the singular product of a dazzlingly original talent.”

Keenan Tyler Oliphant directs this new production, and Christian is a Drama Desk and two-time Obie Award-winning composer/librettist/performer known for making music-centered shows and rituals. Animal Wisdom is certainly one such performance, and the ritual will only unravel more beautiful mystery. With her intimate but thumping music that fuses blues, gospel, and folk, Christian invites you to pay tribute to the forces that shape our lives.

"Heather’s work expands our conception of who can find a home as a visionary artist at Signature," Artistic Director Emily Shooltz said in a statement.