The Greatest Story Ever

Paul Budraitis
Oct 29-Nov 8, 2026

[Program tbd]

Runtime: 55 minutes (no intermission)

A spaceship drifts silently out of orbit, its pilot refusing to come home.

A taxi driver ferries strangers through a series of unguarded moments. An unexpected blend of sci-fi and lo-fi, The Greatest Story Ever, is an intimate, surprising performance where everyone who is in the room shares in the story.

Paul Budraitis — writer, director, performer, set design
Evan C. Anderson — lights, sound, music
Lennart Labarenz — script consultant
Elif Sözer — dramaturgy
John Kendall Wilson — dramaturgy
Anna Telcs-Druss — costumes
Robert Fisher, PhD — cosmology consultant
The IllustrisTNG Project (Volker Springel, principal investigator) — stellar animations

Photo credit — Sebastian Pollin

Project support: John Robinson, Josef Krebs, Ariel Glassman, John Neeleman, Stephen McCandless, Andrius Nemickas, Lenna Koszarny, Andrew Storms, Bebet Caguin, Nicole Stellner, Peter Eberhardy, AJ Epstein, Kairu Yao

The artists

Paul Budraitis is a Berlin-based director, performer, and writer. Born into a family of refugee immigrants, he is a first-generation American who grew up in Queens, New York. Paul is an artist-in-residence at Acker Stadt Palast theater (Berlin), and this production marks the return of the creative team of Budraitis and Anderson to La MaMa E.T.C. following the success of I Love That For You (2023).

Evan Anderson

Evan Anderson is a lighting designer and composer for theatre, dance, and film. Frequent collaborators include The Wooster Group, zoe | juniper, and Paul Budraitis. He is a graduate of Yale School of Drama.

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La Mama is a world-renowned New York cultural institution dedicated to the artist and all aspects of the theatre.