My new play A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored (which I'm currently performing on Wednesday nights) grew out of the January 6th insurrection. My last film, We Pedal Uphill was my very personal attempt to make sense of the climate of fear which seemed to take root in this country in the months and years immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first play of mine that was produced in New York, Bodily Function, grew out of an offhand remark made by a midlevel corporate executive about workplace morale and bathroom breaks. The comment was delivered casually, almost cynically over a brunch with friends in Boston. Maybe the fact that the man who made the comment was not a friend of mine but rather a friend of friends, kept me from asking a pointed follow-up question. And so for weeks afterward I was haunted by the values behind his remarks. And eventually found my way to a play about a woman who has reached the pinnacle of success in her career yet somehow finds herself not quite feeling what she always imagined she would.
For whatever reason, there usually is some kind of thorn or confounding riddle at the center of the scripts I write. I'm drawn to the details of how human beings cope. We are uniquely creative and optimistic animals most of the time and how we manage to overcome, work around or stumble through life's towering obstacles is, I think, where the most vivid storytelling lies.
So it shouldn't have surprised me to find that my latest play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored has left some audience members feeling a kind of emotional whiplash. The piece is a kind of attempt to capture something of the tenuous relationship to truth and reality we find ourselves swimming in these days. And so the man at the center of the piece is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator.
It's difficult to know what to believe as he leads us from one assertion to the next, not much of it able to be held by the same single reality of one person's life.
It turns out that after an hour of very dark laughter, distortions of the facts of our reality and the tension of an audience holding one man's future in their hands through their vote at the end of the show, people need a few min. to process what they've just been through.
And you told us as much in the feedback offered online after the first three performances.
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