“Luckily, there are people like Hermes Saucedo who create new alphabets and languages as a hobby. His Herami font seems ideal for prop use, with visual cues from recognizable ancient scripts, but enough strangeness to make it unique.”
- http://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2011/08/herami-font.html
thanks to matt hooks for the link. I really want to create a play to use this in…
Couch Potatoes// Living Room Songs: Powerless (A Superhero Play) this Weekend!
I’m one half of the props design team on this show. (Which mostly, for me, has involved mime work with the actors, which has been fun!) You should see it!
Chicago playwrights David Brent and Mitch Salm, along with the extremely talented director Jack Tambourri, are bringing a piece of Comic Book Theatre to Chicago like nothing you’ve ever seen, and it premieres this weekend!
Powerless, a play that follows a group of twenty-something…
performing at the First Ward Ball with This Is Not The Studio. photo by Meghan Yeche.
Someone in the audience yelled “did Amy Winehouse really die?!” during this act, and warmed my little heart.
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oh wow, you guys, I am taking my solo show to the Chicago Fringe Festival in September. I’m really, really excited about this. I’d really appreciate it if you would hop on over to the Kickstarter page. (and soon there will be a video, and, if all goes well, possibly also a collaboration with with Alesandra of the amazing ASK Apparel)
No, I am not devastated. I am no more torn to pieces than I have been, for nothing has changed. I am a braver woman now than I once was, a person somewhat closer to a whole, but my past drags behind me like a weighted tail.
If the slate were wiped clean, if we were suddenly seen with new eyes, what then? A foolish exercise. My hands on your face are the hands of a ghost–the ghost whose eyes first looked on you. Wine and time can only cause so much forgetting.
And yet–the cheek-burning burden of the one lost, the one never won, this, I am told, builds character. I can forever write to you–no, some crystal image–in a way the ones who love me can never wrench out. The old romantic poet to his lady from afar. No matter how close you get I want you closer. The musical chairs of a childish pining. But what more can I do? Repeat, repeat, repeat with more daring but no more success.
Let’s say the exit sign to whom those monologues were all delivered has a name, and a voice for radio, and all those wires are covered in tan skin and light hair, and all the light poured through those eyes. Let’s just say affections are better left to a crowded house. But oh, how these hands ache. And in my folly, I breed memories for torment, and where I would feel your heated blood, I will douse myself in ink.
Five? No, nearly six? Six years? Really? My god.
Let’s make a conservative estimate. Once, no, twice a week. A few breaks, so let’s say five years even. Five hundred twenty nights of my life. Five hundred twenty dreams about you.
The devil stands beside an idling truck in an alleyway, light rain falling through the streetlight. He leans against the side, he turns to me and laughs. The devil knows I have smoked these three cigarettes just for his attention, the excuse of his presence. The temperature is out of control. The bar is closing. I do not have the courage to ask where the devil is going next. The devil goes home and plays violin alone.
The devil stands next to me in an elevator, my entire maternal family waits on the roof of the building. He describes to me the history of small rocks, pleased at my recall. My brother draws blood with a bread knife.
The devil in a doorway on my birthday. O, Stay, I want to say. I don’t. It took enough pleading to get this far. I can’t will the devils skin to crawl to mine. I am mortal and I am weak. He, too. He, always.
The devil in a window in a cafe. The devil on a train in the country. The devil makes his plans to come home. I would, some old part of me should say, I would like to build a nest in your heart, despite the space between these branches, and the burning brightness of our separate skies.
it is about 90 degrees. at about midnight. my eyeliner is melting everywhere and I can’t seem to move around properly. at least strangers on the train can’t tell the sweat from the tears.
Our rapid, labored migrations from couch to bed. I say, “my god, the time,” you say, “my god, you are so small, I had forgotten” I say how could I have cut a limb off of my life but still be walking? I am some drunkard citizen of an unknown star.
I stand in a suburban bathroom with a shard of metal. A small girl vomits in a stall. I think– how did it come to this? To karaoke, to missed appointments, to small-town fears. I don’t—
There are men who are kind, I assure myself. I am a broken music box. I am a miscast fool. I am a wasted block of time. I am the fear of a wasted block of time.
Entire past nights of my life curl in on themselves, poisonous, birdlike, scratching at my shoulders I would like this screeching to be over. Each word in either direction seems to turn daggerous after mere moments. Arthur, realizing his has been deceived, that these words came not from his queen’s mouth, despite the resemblance.
I see three bridges before me. I would like to burn only one, but do not know how to control the fire. Seal your lips for ninety days, then open your mouth as a friend’s, not a lover’s. I can only have you as a brother when I have had the time to kill the ghost of you in my bed. The sequence of numbers that means the sound of your voice calls it back again to haunt me every night. Let this exorcism continue, so I may one day stand beside you, secular and strong and self-contained.
my nerves are frayed, my mother keeps on sending telegrams, hopeful but reminders of things I can’t think about, and I just want a drink, when lightning hits the cemetery across the street, the wind roars, hail starts crashing into all the windows despite the heat–
I watch from my bedroom window with each flash of lightning, to make sure the dead are not rising from their graves, because tonight of all nights it feels likely.
Eyeglasses belonging to prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
this picture stopped me dead, and now i feel so cold…
just… oh. oh. oh no. I wish this image weren’t so beautiful. oh, I am upset. it makes me think of how one of the most effective devices in With The Needle That Sings In Her Heart was the pile of shoes on stage. Something about the reduction of a person to an object rendering them incapable of human-object relations…. if atrocity treats a person like an object, someone into something, a thing cannot possess another thing in the same way, and so the discarded pile of their once-personal possessions reads like the pulled-off skin of their personhood. Forgive the incoherence of this ramble– I’m working on a play right now for which I’m doing a series of interviews with people about their relationship to objects in their lives, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.