writing.performance

I once watched my father, a little merry at a party, walk straight through a closed glass sliding door. He was holding a tray of drinks. The door shattered but he kept walking right ahead for about five steps, tray held firm, before blood started running down his face and legs and it occurred to him to stop.

These are troubled times, and sometimes it feels like the country collectively walked through a glass door on 9/11 and is only now faltering, noticing the shards of glass and blood piling up from the cumulative impact of the Bush years.

Charlotte Meehan’s beautiful new performance poem/ play/ litany, Sweet Disaster, unfolds in this kind of space of elastic trauma–the space between event and impact (a folded space of replay). But it refracts the collective through the very personal experiences of loss, interlaced with the mad comedy of despair. It’s at Perishable Theatre in Providence. The performance, directed by Ken Prestininzi, also features excerpts from a film series made by Charlotte’s late husband David Hopkins. David was a stellar film-maker, formally innovative, politically impassioned and wickedly funny. Charlotte and David were working on Sweet Disaster together, and now Charlotte has completed the project alone. Go and see it.

Well, it’s official— my “single play seeking theatre” has got a really cool date in 2009!

More info here

I went with my partner (also a playwright & musician) to MASSMoCA in North Adams, Massachussetts for a couple days last week. There was still snow on the ground. North Adams is a hard-scrabble, beautiful old mill town in Western Mass. It hasn’t had the B&B makeover of the Berkshire pretty towns but it has MASSMoCA, an art gallery/ museum housed in an astonishingly huge old mill, originally a textile mill then an electronics factory and now an art gallery.

We saw Spencer Finch’s exhibition and also Anselm Kiefer’s. Such different work and so inspiring. Finch’s work was light, joyful and in close dialogue with the natural world and scientific processes. Much of it recreated certain light conditions– a huge blue cellophane folded cloud, hung before a painstakingly constructed panel of fluorescent lights of different shades, re-created the light in Emily Dickinson’s garden one summer afternoon. It made me look at the room and the light in it differently—to feel light as a palpable, passing entity. If angels were scientists, I picture them doing this kind of work. (more…)