photo credit: C. Stanley
OCCUPIED TERRITORIES is a one act play with intersecting narratives. An estranged, addict daughter of a Vietnam vet, played by Nancy Bannon, struggles with her father's sudden death while alternately, in the 1967 Vietnam jungle, a 20 year old American soldier - who will become her father - experiences his first traumatic days in the Vietnam War, an event that will impact him and his family forever. When the daughter digs into her father's secret past, the two worlds collide into a surreal and transcendent meeting that offers an opportunity for salvation and hope. Multi-city incarnations including originating in Washington DC and an Off-Broadway run. Nominated for 5 Helen Hayes Awards.
photo credit: Elena Zimmerman
OVERTURE, a devised, evening length theatrical work for incoming theater/musical theater students at American University which incorporated acting, movement, poetry and song to ask how we go about creating connection, community and belonging with strangers. Presented October 2023 at The Katzen Center, (Washington DC) .
Older work:
A MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTE asks about masculinity and privilege. Three men, early 30s, the epitome of swagger and entitlement in high end suits, barrel drunkenly into a hockey game. While reacting to the game, the men also interact with the audience by initiating group chants, offering (and procuring) high-fives and yelling out insults both about the game and the viewers. Despite racist and misogynist language, we found audience members enthusiastically raising their hands to high-five the actors, whooping and hollering along with them. According to this performance run, charm and charisma are strong factors in how much we’re willing to overlook. Originally presented at The 92nd St Y (NYC).
CORNFIELD was inspired by America’s industrial agricultural practices. It was presented in progress via a residency at The Baryshnikov Art Center (NYC) and again at Transformer Gallery (Washington DC). Cornfield is a visual and performance work with almost 200 wall-to-wall verticals of 7’ high “cornstalks” made of wood, wire and visqueen, projections, three actors and a surrounding soundscape. Viewers experience the performances from within the installation at close proximity to the actors. The experience begins with the cornfield flooded with intense, saturated color. Soon that fades and it is dusk. Birds fly overhead, a brief rain shower. Fireflies emerge. Night finally falls and with it, the arrival of crickets, cicadas and musical tones. The characters in Cornfield are challenging. Echoing the depletive qualities of the giant corn monoculture that is consuming America's agricultural tradition, they are nasty - aggressive, violent, racist and manipulative. Collaborators: Brian MacDevitt, Darron West, Ilona Somogyi, SM was Cynthia Baker.
PUNCTURE is a personal meditation on loss. We look, look away, then look back, and it’s gone; a childhood home, a relationship, a parent, a landscape. It is inevitable and irretrievable. Puncture was inspired by a surprise, terminal diagnosis that blindsided my active mother and the long nightmarish decline that preceded her death. The scenic element by collaborator Brian MacDevitt almost entirely surrounded the audience and was an expression of the fragile Arctic tundra while the eight characters, ages 11-60, were dressed/made up to suggest polar bears. Filled with banal yet deeply earnest chatter and lame attempts to connect, one-by-one each performer is removed from the work. The characters remain unable to maintain concentration long enough to notice the attrition nor their own impending doom. The easily distracted state triumphs. Puncture also asks about humanity engaging in meaningless frittering away to satisfy short term interests while the planet's life as we know it is disappearing. The final gesture is the eleven-year-old alone, wandering the ice until it cracks underneath her and she, too succumbs to the vanishing foundation and disappears under the floor. Originally presented at The Chocolate Factory, (NYC). Collaborators: Brian MacDevitt, Darron West, Ilona Somogyi, SM was Cynthia Baker.
THE POD PROJECT is a large scale performance-installation consisting of 13 private, one-on-one performances housed within 13 sculpted, personalized cylindrical spaces, each approximately 8’ in diameter and 16’ high. It asks about private behavior and accidental dramas brought on by forced, extreme proximity. Crossing the threshold of a “pod”, we pop into: a dentist's office, a mountaintop ski-lift, a cocoon, a snowglobe, a shower, and more. The scene content ranges from highly interactive to resolvedly voyeuristic. Originally presented at 20 Greene Gallery (NYC), it had a subsequent production at Dance New Amsterdam (NYC). The creation of The Pod Project was supported by private donors and crowd funding. Collaborators: Brian MacDevitt, Darron West, Ilona Somogyi, SM was Cynthia Baker.
DRINKING INK, A PORTRAIT IN TEN PARTS asks about our ability to heal. We meet Cherish, a weary, hardened provider with wicked humor and simmering rage and her husband, LJ, a settling pool of left-over pride and canned beer, as they navigate the weeks and months following their son’s reckless death. They are repeatedly visited and increasingly derailed by a caller, an intruder, who might be their son or, as he claims, a series of characters from their life: a neighbor, a brother, their dog, a young man, a judgmental public. Or perhaps the visitor is simply embodied Poetry, bringing the potential for healing through its offering of near-mystic awareness and a surging sense of connection and surrender. There are ten attempts to bring Cherish and LJ closer to acceptance, peace healing and relief. Originally presented at The 92nd St Y (NYC).