Part 6: The November Project

Screenshots of process between Beth and I as we tested the prompts before giving them to our participants.

As we went into pre-production for Matter, Fertile Ground announced its first all-digital festival. Somewhere in the weeks that followed, a new seed germinated that I was excited to share with Beth: what if we focused on the unknown that November would bring, and held up a magnifying glass to it. Looked squarely at what we do not know. Time box the creation period to the weeks immediately following the election, and see what happens to us? I thought, "How will the isolation and frustration of 2020 play out through those weeks, particularly for women, as the survivors of the most openly misogynistic President we’ve ever had and the primary caregivers of an at-home living/working environment? Encompassing many identities, the piece might say: “Here we are, the United States of Women in the Bathroom, sorting ourselves out. This is what it looks like.” That it was the centennial of (some) women getting the vote was icing on the cake.

This is how The November Project came to be - different than Rest Room, but informed by it.

Beth Thompson

I brought the idea to Beth who, in the lifelong process of understanding their identity and coming out as non-binary, felt called to embrace that change in their experience and let it inform the piece as it transformed into The November Project. Their call to include nonbinary/trans folks was a no-brainer in terms of inclusion but trickier in terms of doing it well. Talking about the “subtle misogyny” or “pressures” that women face within this piece is a whole different deal than the life threatening oppression that trans people have faced in the Trump era and long before it - something I can’t speak to from personal experience and, as a white cis-passing non-binary person, Beth can't speak to either. We are both still reflecting on whether it was possible to redirect the piece from it's foundational history with integrity. Beth is inspired and warmed by the enthusiasm of the non-binary performers and the repetitions found in their contributions. And, they're also concerned about the ways that the piece may contribute to folks unconsciously conflating non-binary folks with women. But, in the end, including the transforming identities of Rest Room's 2007 chorus members felt like the fullest choice.

Beth Thompson

Beth agreed to take the lead on directing The November Project, accepting the mossy old baton and running far, far into the distance with it. The process has been miraculous, for many reasons. For one, we were able to engage many of the original cast members while adding many more - linking past and present performers I love. Another is the level of Beth’s care in crafting the container that our performers would create within, with extreme compassion and curiosity and safety and thoughtfulness. They redefined the narrative spine of The November Project as an individually-powered process that addresses escape, anxiety, and practices of self-soothing to find hope - vastly expanding the scope into a different, universal story. Next, Beth tested those prompts with our commissioned composer, Yawa Amenta (a feat I’ve never tried with my composer husband!), to bring about a musical piece that far exceeded our expectations.

There’s Lava’s clear-sighted instinct and intellect at work in editing the mountain of material submitted by our 23 contributors. And not least is witnessing myself and others’ aging process through the documentation of the piece - not just in how we look, but how our lives have changed. Lava’s wildly talented wife, Alex Ramirez de la Cruz, figures prominently in the piece. Beth is now managing director of Many Hats. So many cast members are still vibrant parts of our tightly knit Portland theater community. Which, through the wonders of the pandemic, allowed us to work together despite people having moved away. Interestingly, while The November Project set out to document a very specific and pivotal moment in history, it doesn’t necessarily allude to what would become “Stop the Steal” or the illegal insurrection of the nation’’s capital by a group of unlawful rioters on January 6, 2021. At the atomic-level of personal v. political, it’s almost as if The November Project captures a release of pressure, that lull before reaction began to build again.

Looking back on a 26-year process, I have to ask myself: Why won’t it let me go, this idea that came from a quasi-offhand comment from an NA meeting nearly three decades ago?

Beth Thompson

I can only speculate, but from where I’m standing it seems that for my mom, drugs were a way that she could access some kindness to herself, even a belief in her own self worth. Maybe, that time and space of being high was locked in a private room, a private mental space that was her own, where no one could tell her she was worthless or flawed.

And the woman in the NA meeting I was struck by may not have been saying this at all, but what I subconsciously heard was: “I will not have my one source of well-being fucked with by a man.” Yes, she was flawed, as we all are, in looking for self-love in the wrong place. But she had found it for the moment, and she would not have it compromised.

In my imagination of the piece, the bathroom (as code for addiction) represented a temporary refuge from a torrent of self-hating thoughts specific to women who feel they are falling short on a variety of expectations specific to being female: the way we look, the way we’re perceived by others, our ability to please others, and to be kind, liked, and nice at all times. However, the rain of self-criticism for ANYONE fighting the misogynist, hetreonormative patriarchy on a daily basis is often relentless. Therefore the release from this self-critical (self-hating?) mindset is an exquisite thing - setting down a heavy and ancient burden.

Joan Rivers inspo shot by Truman Moore

In our post-Spice Girls reality, where female self empowerment has become marketable, it’s hard to imagine a world where you would need to keep your own self regard a secret. Yet we all know how hard it is to practice actual self-love on the daily. Self-care is a booming industry, and at the bottom of the products and services and creams is a feeling of well-being and self-compassion that you can’t get from a package. That feeling is elusive, and worth chasing.

And does the feeling (still) need to be a secret? Or am I allowed to wear my worthiness on the outside, without fear of being labelled self-aggrandizing or overly superior, or any of the other adjectives we use to describe women who might act a little too self-assured (including man-ish)?

In Beth and Lava’s 2020 November Project, you will find nonbinary and female people finding a space to come to stillness. You will see the characters fighting their anxiety, falling into despair and sitting with their boredom. And because our performers are all dramatists by nature, they begin, eventually, to move the heaviness they arrived with. Somehow. Through their bodies. Until it transforms into something else. You will see that self-soothing and the ability to self-care is a very human, perhaps even an animal, trait (see info on how animals shake themselves to restore equilibrium after traumatic fight/flight reaction). Humans facing the highest orders of adversity can, somehow, find a way through it - and watching fictional characters engage in this process is why I believe theater exists: to watch others go through it.

SPOILER: There are several moments toward the end of the 12 minute November Project where you see performers looking in the mirror at themselves, BEING ALRIGHT WITH THEMSELVES. It’s a quiet thing, but revolutionary. One performer, Trisha Fey Lazo Elizarde-Miller, wears a facial-type mud mask and looks at herself. She is neither vain nor disappointed: she approves. SHE approves. Nobody else.

Part 5: Resurfacing

Flash forward: 2020. Many Hats, like every other theatre company in the world, had its plans wrecked by the outbreak of a deadly virus. As the weeks of quarantine wore on, people started to get creative with their entertainments. At 11:56pm on a weeknight, Kailey Rhodes Venmoed me $10 with instructions for a choreography commission. I laughed, and texted her: “hahahhaah.”

But the next day, all I could think about was Rest Room. I’d thought of a mirror piece for Kailey before, something about putting on a face (a shield, a mask) while things (expressions, emotions, fluids) were trying to come out of it. But let’s be real: even with that slight offshoot, I’m still just circling around Rest Room.

I noticed how I felt trapped in my house, and sometimes, trapped inside the bathroom inside my house - because it was private. How privacy, even from one’s own partner, had shifted in meaning. How toilet paper had become a thing, and cleaning. I felt crazy, like many other people, much of the time. Many other people were (and are) not only using more drugs and drinking during quarantine, their mental health in general - with or without addiction to battle - has been put severely at risk.

When George Floyd was murdered, I felt rage, disbelief, despair. Kailey and I were trading videos that suddenly had a new meaning in the week after his death. They reflected senselessness through repetition; emotional values of grief/hysteria, and the culpability that comes with looking in the mirror. What does it mean to look at yourself in the mirror as a white woman at this time, with everything that’s happening? Moreover, what does does a Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color see when they look in the mirror right now?

A couple of the videos are below. 

Lava came to photograph Eric and I the following week as part of a photography project she’d taken on during the quarantine, #porchportraits. I bounced off of her a half-joking (not really) crazy (not that crazy) idea to do a Rest Room “reboot,” relocated to home bathrooms. Taking the feelings of isolation and frustration that came with addiction in the former Rest Room, which were now springing from different (or additional) causes. She was immediately up to edit video for such a “remount.” Because Lava doesn’t pretend to be interested in things she’s not, I took her seriously.

In the height of summer, as protests all over the world raged on day after day, night after night, we had a Many Hats board meeting. Trying to make sense of the company’s way forward, we were entertaining a variety of options and timeframes, what-ifs, ands and maybes. It was bewildering, and I was having trouble leading. Nothing that we might do as a company felt urgent, except protecting and honoring Black lives. Could we do that? Suspicion was thick around a tumble of corporate statements concerning this topic. Would they keep their promises? Would we? (The idea to co-produce Matter came the next morning.)

Somewhere in the middle of our meeting’s muddled conversation, our intrepid board secretary Ann Siqveland said something to the effect of “Whatever you plan, just keep in mind that after November, everything will be different. Either way, everything will be different.” 

It stopped me cold, because she was so right.

Mirror phrase notes, 2020

It was a warm June evening and I was zooming from my back yard, but in a few short months it would be November and the fate of the world, at least for the near future, would be decided.

Was there a way we could respond to that?

I went back to the Rest Room materials from 2007. What did we have? Nope, no actual video of the piece. Lots of stills. A beautifully crafted soundtrack by Annalise Albright-Woods that was super specific to the previous ideas and a time from before. I brought this precious artifact to share with Beth Thompson, and she said “I’m not sure I have a CD player anymore.”

If we were to revisit Rest Room, what link from the previous piece would endure? There was no question in my mind, given the research with Kailey, that it would be the mirror phrase, as we had called it in 2007. Did I remember it? Not exactly. But I began to scribble about past and present, drawing on faint memories provoked by the pictures and combining them with the discoveries Kailey and I had mined. Gradually, the potential for an expanded, 2020 narrative began to emerge.

Part 4: Adding a Chorus

Pictures of the 2007 show by Lava Alapai from the secret Many Hats vault are here.

Flash forward again: in 2007, directors Megan Kate Ward and Kristan Seemel generously asked PCS if we could perform Rest Room in their brand spanking new one at the Armory during a quieter summer month. For some reason, they said yes.

We decided the piece would need additional dancers to adequately fill the large women’s room under the main floor. Among the crop of eight movers that Lava recruited (and apparently I auditioned, though I don’t remember that) are several Portland luminaries, including one Beth Thompson, appearing in their second Portland show. This auspiciously marked the beginning of a long term collaboration that endures between us today, now as Artistic Director and Managing Director. Yo and Paige joined us again, hallelujah. Because I was trying to get better at communicating my vision to collaborators for work that didn’t start with a script, I made this zine to share with the cast - an image morgue with a poem that illuminates the journey of the main character.

L-R, Lava Alapai and Annalise Albright-Woods, photo by Yolanda Suarez

Annalise re-composed the audio track with the incorporation of two new interviews. One was with a co-worker, who generously sat down and shared a gutwrenching story of near suicide with me when we really didn’t know each other at all. The other was a rangier narrative I thought would help to give more of a through-line to the piece by parsing it out in segments over the course of the show. The idea was that having me-as-main character telling the audience a story would strengthen the piece as a play, instead of feeling like a lot of disconnected voices providing information as soundtrack to dance. So, I performed the story in voiceover by paraphrasing the original source recording, and it was woven into the larger score. This, IMO, didn’t really work at all; I don’t think the story or my performance were half as compelling as for, instance, the co-worker’s interview. Turns out the piece thrived on audio verité.

Working on my makeup instead of my choreo. :/ Photo by Yolanda Suarez

Working with the chorus in the PCS bathrooms was an unforgettable experience. The bathrooms were absolutely brand new, for one thing - like, I think we ripped plastic off of the stall doors. We tested and perfected various body lengths to bathroom architecture: can everyone grip the toilet paper dispenser and push the door forward extending both arms? Can you touch the hand of the person next to you over the stall wall? Once we got going, the tenor of this group devising was one of wild abandon. At one point we decided that everyone would belly crawl on the floor UNDER the stalls toward one end of the room as an “exit,” while at another point Jaime Flynn perched on TOP of the stall walls IN THE SPLITS. These were their ideas! Unfortunately in managing the choreography of an 11-person piece, I dropped the ball on truly perfecting my own movement score, and was never happy with my own character’s climax and ending. This is the piece where I’d learn the hard way that I would not be able to perform in my own work to a level that would satisfy me, and realized I’d need to direct from outside. *sigh.

Our ad in the Drammy program that year.

Lava upped her video game by positioning a camera to shoot directly into one of the stalls and projecting the feed on the outside of the stall door. This offered the audience a way to “see inside the stall” with seemingly X-Ray vision, which was a fantastic device for contrasting private/public, offstage/onstage behavior. The effect of the LED light on the reflective metallic surface was eerie, dislocating. Somewhere, there is a hilarious picture of a camera gaffe taped to the ceiling in order to achieve this.

We again performed multiple times, letting slightly bigger groups of 8-12 in at a time. Mead Hunter generously wrote about it on his blog, pictured below (you can read through the post by clicking on the page icons below the image).

One more story: I was never that great of an actor, a better performer I’d say. I was in the habit of not eating through tech, getting really run down, and finding an emotional breakthrough (mostly through exhaustion) in our final dress run that I could never get back in performance. One such experience happened with dear Rozlyn “Skeeter” Reynolds: my character busts out of a stall to find Rozlyn at the counter, dealing with one of those days-of-the-week pillboxes. We’d created a lazzi of opening and closing the little container lids, checking and re-checking with paranoid, compulsive repetition. The audio featured my mom during this moment (again), and I went to pieces - I want to say unexpectedly, except looking at the mounting evidence as I write this, I see I most certainly should have expected that. Let’s just say it wasn’t staged that way. From within the scene Rozlyn looked at me with such a startle, as though she was afraid she’d done something wrong, or that I was not okay and might run from the room. We played through and checked in later, and I had no better explanation for her. Her eyes unlocked something in me that opened the goddamn flood gates.

A promotional image

Part 3: Site Specificity

Pictures of the 2006 show by Lava Alapai from the secret Many Hats vault are here. (All photos, right, by Lava Alapai.)

Flash forward again: I’m living in Portland, and Many Hats is offered a spot in PCS’ JAW Festival’s site specific performance component once known as You Are Here (shout out Mead Hunter!), taking place at the World Trade Center that year, 2006. Many Hats at that time was Lava Alapai (my then partner), sound designer Annalise Albright-Woods and myself. Together, we put together a new, site specific version of Rest Room. Finally, I had a set. 

L-R, Myself and Yolanda Suarez

I got connected with Yolanda Suarez, and remember the two of us having about the most fun you can have with your clothes on while playing around in the rest room on an abandoned floor of the office building where I was a receptionist for my day job. Yolanda had very recently collected her MFA in acting from the University of Idaho and from my perspective, ideas seemed to flow out of us in a true state of play virtually upon our first meeting. That doesn’t happen every day! 

Eventually, Paige Jones joined us - I’d met Paige at her epic 4th of July parties of yore - and the characters’ archetypes began to emerge. Yolanda was the “party girl” user, Paige was the user with years of recovery, thrown into chaos by an unwanted gift. I was the user teetering over the edge from “experimental” to “actually in trouble.” The two of them were fearless in exploring what a dance piece in a public bathroom could be. Not only did we get very intimate with the architecture in ways I can’t quite imagine now, we incorporated the motion detectors on the sinks, and the only alteration to the space we made was adding velcro so that the stall door could stay open when we wanted it to. From the script:

The ACTORS discover one another.  This is a play that involves the following elements:

L-R, Yolanda Suarez and myself

• Levels

• Chapstick

• A game of peekaboo

• Mistrust

• One watching another in extreme pain

• Desperation to connect

• Ends with partying, running about, and mad flushing of toilets

Annalise had expertly cleaned up the sound recordings and retooled the accompanying music in collaboration with composer Matt Marble. Lava added an entirely new layer by introducing a camera to the show, which pushed live feed to a monitor displayed in the hallway outside the bathroom, showing passersby what was going on inside through a surveillance-like lens. It might not have been the greatest shot, but it was very successful in letting the mainstage reading attendees (that year was The Listener, Telethon, Lost Wavelengths, and A Feminine Ending) know what we were up to and making them curious to attend (Lava has been known to have an uncanny, accidental talent for marketing). 

Yolanda Suarez

We performed in a three stall bathroom with audiences of about five people at a time. Boy, were they close to us. It was a huge challenge just to figure out where to look while performing. We performed the piece multiple times throughout the day around the mainstage readings, allowing several small groups in. There was a last minute change to WHICH bathroom we’d be performing in due to a quirk with facilities on the day of the shows, and I almost lost my mind. 

Site. Specific! 

Kelsey Tyler was very patient in breaking the news to me, and actually, it was astonishing how universal the architecture really was - the stall size, the way the doors worked, the spacial relationship to the sink and the mirror. The spaces in some ways were actually interchangeable.

Part 2: Performance

First promotional postcard, note the rave-inspired design and clever(?) play on Albee in the tagline.

After realizing how I was kind of surrounded by addiction, I asked five of the women closest to me, including my mother, if they’d agree to be interviewed about their relationship to substances. I asked the same five questions to each of them and recorded our phone conversations on the floor of my room in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. With a Radio Shack-level cassette tape setup, the audio fidelity was not great. I asked a Los Angeles-based sound designer, John Zalewski, if he’d edit them into a sound design for a dance theatre piece, and Rest Room was born. When John flew out to work with me, I didn’t have a shred of food in the refrigerator to offer him after his long flight from LA and asked him to go to bed hungry, saying we’d get something in the morning. Sorry, John! That was cruel and unusual. FWIW: I think I’ve grown as a host and collaborator since then, I hope to make it up to you someday!

The bag and I.

The recordings were gritty, documentary style. John’s music was minimalistic, alternating between gloomy/threatening and absurd, with disturbing false cheer. The movement was fanciful, messy, ridiculous. I convinced two other women, and eventually a man, to work with me on it - God bless them, I think they worked for something on par with subway fare (this was the guideline I’d received from the formerly downtowny, scrappy upstarts who’d come before me). The patient and brave Lona Leigh (now Lona Leigh McManus) and Heather Soto (now Heather Soto de Oliveira) helped me learn through generous play.

It was a scant eight months after 9/11, yet I’d been sitting around wondering why it was so hard to get my life started in New York. :/ Lona Leigh, Heather Soto and I did our first draft at chashama in May, 2002 on a mixed bill of other experimental works. In the prologue I played with a bag, which was a metaphor for a vessel holding my stash, among other things. But the bag was big and stiff enough to lose myself in - that was the bit, losing myself in the bag. I performed while wearing a nicotine patch, and people didn’t know if it was part of the costume or not (it wasn’t).

There was a bit of a theme about women’s work: cooking and cleaning. There was, I believe, some manic, aggressive vacuuming. There were buckets for cleaning that we later wailed with, Pete Townshend-style, in rebellion of gender expectations. There was another section with a (real) child’s easy bake oven in which we “baked” a cake onstage during the course of the piece, getting higher as the cake baked and breaking into scary screams of ecstasy when it was done.

L-R Andrew Robbins, Heather Soto

Our second time through was a bit more cohesive. Three months later we performed at HERE for something they then called the American Living Room Festival. Each character had more development - including one segment in which Heather Soto plastered herself all over an impassive male rest room attendant in what seemed like a druggy attempt to get his impossible attention.

L-R Lona Leigh, myself, Heather Soto

We didn’t have budget or design for any scenic pieces, but in my mind it took place in a public rest room. I was inspired by the old department store bathrooms of Fredrick and Nelson or Nordstrom’s, which included a discrete sitting area outside of the room with the stalls. These serene, empty living rooms-inside-a-bathroom were kept behind the closed door of the women’s room as a whole. There was the suggestion that a woman might want to recline in private for a few moments, collecting herself, between peeing and facing the outside world. These were exactly the public/private spaces that I felt the kind of secrets the woman in the NA meeting spoke about could take place.

Here’s the video/audio that survives of that NYC version, edited by Lava Alapai. You can’t make it out, but the audio interviews end with my mom, weeping and saying, “I think I’ve had enough - of this conversation.” Even though I grew a tiny bit immune to this bit of audio through performance, it stings now in a totally different way.

L-R Lona Leigh, myself, Heather Soto

Part 1: The Seed

“No man comes in between me and my drugs.”

A pic of me from this era.

The woman sat across from me in the wide circle at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. It was 1995. She was one of the only other women besides myself I’d ever seen at these meetings. They were filled with middle aged white men, men from the Santa Clarita Valley who came for solace and recovery, but couldn’t help giving me a shocked look. Even though there was a general air of acceptance, I was an oddity. 

I was used to it. I was 20, head shaved, yet still looked like a pre-teen. I was student at the art school in town the townies generally disdained. I was there because I’d gotten in over my head with party drugs in my 2nd year at college - missed an important final, stopped turning in work, had erratic attendance and behavior. After a series of embarrassing events, my theater faculty had devised a plan for my probation. Attending 10 NA meetings was part of the plan. After my initial distaste, I grew into something like a respectful stranger. Yet I quickly became fascinated with the ritual, the people, and the storytelling. It took awhile for me to speak up and really feel a part of things, and this woman was part of that. 

Her words sliced through the large, echoing, multipurpose room. She detailed a night with a man she’d brought home, the dance between attending to him and attending to her addiction. How she both shared and protected her stash, and the very clear and precise order of importance of these two entertainments. Which one would be with her in the morning and which one would not be. She was strident and unapologetic. She was breaking something down for a group of men that they had never heard in these words before: they would never be as important to her as her own sense of self-preservation. In fact, they were a far distant second - a toy, you might say, in the arena of her getting hers. 

“No man comes in between me and my drugs,” she warned, drawing an immovable line. 

A very unflattering selfie from the solo trip I took to reset after creating a big mess for myself at school.

This statement rocketed into my heart and lodged itself there. She was articulating something that seemed so taboo - a woman putting herself first, not for the good of others, but for “selfish” ends. This seemed like a peek behind the curtain of womanhood. If the men in this meeting were surprised to see in me a young woman who had not been “good,” what they needed to know is the the degree of self-serving calculations that had gone on behind the eyes of the women in their lives, and that they were clearly ignorant to the ways in which perhaps they themselves had been puppeted by a woman attending to her own addiction. If addiction can be defined as the drama with yourself, starring yourself, these men had seen themselves as the starring players, and the women as the supporting cast. To have a woman expose the ways in which men were secondary to herself, for something as morally uncouth - dare I say unladylike - as drug addiction, seemed like her telling the whole room our big, gender specific secret. 

Clearly I’m making a lot of assumptions here. I should say I grew up with a mother typical of her time in her absolute subjugation of self to family. As the Feminist Survival Podcast 2020 calls it, she had “Human Giver Syndrome” - the idea that some people, very often women, are to give everything they have in terms of resources and energy to somebody who can achieve their dreams - yet the Giver’s only dream is to give to them. It was my mom’s choice to devote herself to the family, especially us kids, and a privileged choice, at that. But she was also a devoted user and later addicted to prescription drugs - and for her too, the woman in the meeting had articulated something real. There was a private relationship between her and her drugs that none of us family members, however primary to her purpose in life, could touch. 

Flash forward: I was ok. I straightened up to fly right, started making my own work, graduated, and eventually moved to New York City. I no longer felt out of control around drinking and drugs, but the ongoing pressures I felt triggered my addictive impulses just the same. I tried out Al-Anon meetings, for adult children of alcoholics and addicts, in search of the root of these behaviors. My eating became disordered, addictive, and pre-bulimic. I went to meetings for that. The Program isn’t for everyone, but it helped me, and I thought a lot about addiction during that time. I gradually began to realize I’d been surrounded by addicts and addiction my entire life. 

Next week: Performance