The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller February 23, 2011

'The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller' takes a startling and surprisingly humorous, upside-down view of what happens when the Western world intrudes on an ancient, so-called primitive culture, telling the story from the native peoples' point-of-view. Set among the Asmat tribe of New Guinea, the play explores the still-unsolved disappearance in 1961 of Michael C. Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a celebrated anthropologist who collected artifacts from the Asmat culture during two expeditions there. The Asmat culture, which developed for thousand of years in isolation before being discovered in the mid-20th century, and whose woodcarving traditions are now world-renowned - expresses its revered, centuries-old spiritual relationship between the living and their dead ancestors in rituals such as head-hunting and cannibalism.