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