Philly Fringe 2025: Cannonball presents Nick Gilllette and Nick Jonczak’s VOYNICH

The Voynich manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it in 1912. It’s been traced back to early 15th-century Europe. There are 234 pages, nine by six inches, with illustrations, divided into five sections on science, one on astrology, and possibly some recipes in the back. No one has ever been ever to translate it. No other artifacts have ever been found in this language.

Gillette explains most of this in a quick introduction, projecting some sample pages, and then says he has discovered a way to translate it. What follows is nearly an hour of mime and sound while Gillette does dialogue and monologue in “Voynich”, the untranslated language of the manuscript. There’s a couple riding in a cart, talking quietly, Gillette trading off on both parts. There’s an old man consulting the book, a vicious guard, even angry bees.

Gillette chats away as if we know what he’s saying, yet we do, because he’s acting out scenes that are timeless human moments: scenes of a family, refugees, death. We get to know these people trapped behind language, if they ever existed. There are a few props: blankets, a stick, a wicker basket. He uses them for different effects. A lost world reappears in the small black-box space and then fades away.

Gillette intersperses these with ingenious segments where he interacts with the projections; I could have used more of that, though I don’t know how it would have added to the story.

These days the manuscript is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and widely available online. For another weekend, VOYNICH is running at Asian Arts.

Know before you go: VOYNICH contains depictions of violence and flashing lights.

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