When you don’t have a script at the beginning of a project, it’s often hard as the director/lead deviser to explain to your collaborators what the hell you are envisioning. Before embarking on the 2007 staging, I assembled a lot of bad, black and white Xeroxed images of genius photographs to help me conceptualize the next leg of the piece. I sequenced them into a binder and wrote a kind of prose poem or around them with the goal of sharing a kind of “inner monologue” of how I saw the piece unfolding from the main character’s point of view. Below is a transcription of the writing and many of the images I compiled.

Out on the street

It was a regular day

I got high

but I felt like a shade of myself

faint markers

disoriented me

everything seemed like an omen

I couldn’t quite read

then I began to feel as though

someone was following me

but when I looked behind me it was only myself

I stopped.

I needed relief.

so I found a bathroom

I thought it would be cool and quiet

maybe institutional and freaky but

sterile at least

it was crowded, teeming with life

did anyone feel like I did?

but I had problems of my own

So many stories

and me

I felt pretty good, or OK, when I came in

I could fake it

but now,

not so good.

I was so dirty

and my brain was splotchy.

the women,

in their boxes

so clean

they had it all together

the laughter of the women

had made me lonely

and I knew it would be a long way back

I started to freak out

they seemed to belong to a club

I didn’t belong to

and they hated me

not human

I felt like a hundred eyes were

casting judgement on me

then I realized…

they were just looking at themselves.

and then,

they were beautiful.

Beautiful.

It suddenly got quiet.

I thought about the women.

maybe I was beautiful, too

I suddenly felt sexy

In control again.

I wanted someone badly right then

then sick

and very, very tired

what I needed

and then it came

[laughter]

it felt like we were the only two people in the world

then something happened

that made everything change

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