I'm spending a good portion of this summer workshopping my storefront spectacle, No Place to Hide. In a nutshell, I appear inside the storefront window of a local business somewhere typing on a laptop and either by means of projector or flatscreen, every word I type is instantly enlarged and displayed to passersby.
I started doing this piece without fully understanding exactly why I was doing it. Something just seemed to propel me to want to try this out.
Truthfully, I'm not yet sure what this will all amount to, whether the playwright in me will ultimately find this format interesting enough. (I tend to want my work to be somehow transformative, either by way of taking an audience on a journey, or at least shaking them up a bit and the jury's still out on whether this idea has the potential to do this for us.)
This past weekend I arrived in Hudson, NY thanks to the generosity and can-do attitude of Linda Mussman, the visionary leader of TSL (Time Space Limited), a converted bakery on Columbia Street in Hudson which functions as theatre, movie theatre, gallery, art school and community center. Essentially, if you crave the unexpected and you find yourself in Hudson, the best place to start is TSL.
Before my Hudson outing, I brought the piece to another small town, Keene, NH where my dear friend Vicky Pittman who is Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Colonial Theatre hosted me and my setup in the theatre's corner storefront. It was clear to me just how loved Vicky and the Colonial programming are by this community by the outpouring of support me and my little experiment received. Here's a link to a lovely write-up we got in the Keene Sentinel.
As I meander up and down the Northeast Corridor it's becoming clear to me that depending on the kindness of fellow artists like Linda and Vicky may be an essential key to my 2-3 day encounters with small communities.
And I'm so grateful that my fellow artists trust me to make something special, special and strange, but special enough to warrant their support.
I'll try and blog about further appearances as they unfold. Next stop: White River Junction, Vermont.
On the first weekend in August, you'll find me perched in one of several fabulous storefront windows of Revolution.
