The nine playtexts (and Linger, an urtext) here are a complete cycle.

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I might someday have collected them under the title Suntapes.

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And called them traumedies.

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You may note many – or all – seem to end as they’re about to begin. 

 

[My] theater does what theater is:  explores traumatic time & space: an interior social time that begins after it’s ended, a space whose entryway opens as it closes:  all which resists telling or representation. Resists – doesn’t prevent.

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I suppose, in an orthodox sense, these texts perform this resistance.

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As a rule, "actors" should be seen as, and considered, waste – in the original sense of uncultivated land – to exude a physical intimacy not generally – but perhaps more frequently, now – mounted on stage.

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What strikes me in these plays is the hunger the inhabitants have – the inhabitants of these worlds have – to speak. And that this hunger (speech), for the most part, defies them.

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Early on (1996), in Sap, I heard an inhabitant articulate it clearly:  avoid telling the story at all cost. Clearly a strategy for survival – for seizing a kind of power – used by some inhabiting these worlds. Intuition told me the next cycle of work would be actively resisting this resistance. My fear was – it would be to the detriment of their truth. My hope was – that, too, would get told.

 

So far … I think I was right.

 

As is wished and longed for, imagined and demanded, at the end of Oven:

 

McRASTON

We’ll have a life we’ll have a life we’ll have a life.  Life life life life life.  Story after story after story, story story story story story story story.  Stories.  That’s why we’re here.  Stories.  Story story story story story story story story.  Go and do and see and laugh.  Laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.  Go and do and come and go and go and do and be.  Go and do and see and laugh and fuck and run and tell, tell everyone, tell everything, tell.  We’ll tell and tell and tell and tell til the telling will explode.  And then what’s inside the telling will tell.

 

 

A debt of gratitude to the actors who embodied and will embody these worlds, these words.

 

I trust my eternal life to the inhabitants of these written worlds, and am pleased at the thought that you are here, poised to meet them, if you choose.