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.