Calamitous carny, Samson Y Hiss, the award-winning composer and record-holding one-man band, brings his psychotic ooze of circus horror, opera, and theatre to Oakland. The theatrical experience features an original story, operatic vocals, circus performers, stunt artists, overhead projectors and a live band.
Patient 51 escapes an insane asylum, falls headfirst into a traveling carnival and flees across the desert from the authorities—a wake of vultures. Patient 51, a newly committed anarchist, endures experimental shock “therapy.” There's Manhattan, the militant head nurse who turns patients into guinea pigs. And Joplin, the carnival fairy and fearful employee of a traveling sideshow. Carnival of Psychos isn't a place, but a theatrical escape hatch into terror and lunacy.
Carnival of Psychos is an original theatrical performance featuring a live band of carnies. The last show Hiss staged in Oakland, One-Handed Witch, sold out and then shook the knickers off the country from here to Salem, MA. Now the carnival is coming, and with it … madness.