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I’ve been trying to organize the images I’ve collected over the years. Here are a few more. (These come from various published articles or official social media accounts, mostly instagram and FB. If you are looking for images, those are the best places to check.) 

intp / Chaotic neutral / Archaeologist / Touch of magic

Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling “light em up” #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter

 Macbeth: 

Lady Macbeth: 

Lady Macduff: 

Duncan: 

Malcolm: 

Banquo: 

Porter: 

Danvers: 

Bald Witch: 

Sexy Witch: 

Boy Witch: 

Hecate: 

Speakeasy: 

Fulton: 

Agnes: 

Bonus: 

White Masks:

Black Masks:

Kit (because these both suits her):

A few ground rules, and the rest will be under a cut for the spoiler averse and because it is long as hell.

Things I can do: Describe what we did and show you photos of what my team created in two of the blank canvass spaces. Things I can’t do: Give you photos of the fully dressed Fallow Cross village. You can find some via this article though so you have an idea of what is there. Things I won’t do: Draw you a map and tell you how to get there or go into detail about the children’s programs they’ve created in the space.

THE BETTER NETWORK

Fulton’s Bird soft sculpture. felt.

How he came to be: Annual May trip. These were not my favorite shows. That is always the risk of flying across the country.

But there was a favorite moment: Following Assaf’s Fulton, I was temporarily pulled out of my blahhhs by a scene in the funeral parlor. He sat down with his bird cradled in his hands and began speaking to it in a hushed voice and gesturing as if it was a conversation. His expressions- ranging from concerned to afraid- and the idea of having a chat with the bird and the bird answering back was something I’d never seen another Fulton do, and it was endearing and completely what I needed to see.

The show in the creepy hotel with the masks still looms so very large in New York. Immersive shows here, whether they intend to or not, are in dialogue with the story of Sleep No More and the expectations it has set about operational scale, interactive modality, aesthetics, choreography, design, you name it. You can feel this particularly at Third Rail shows: throughout Grand Paradise one detected deliberate embraces of the Punchdrunk idea, and in other parts, deliberate rejections of it.

If, like me, you’ve spent the last year or so thirsting for something new to come along and fill the void that’s opened up through the slow disenchantment process at the McKittrick Hotel, then you’ll likely find HERE to be an intriguing and challenging response to the state of NYC immersive theater. Rather than play larger, it plays radically smaller. The time scale is cut to an hour; episodic by design, the story unfolds in very deliberately selected stages. Spectacle is out, extreme familiarity is in.

After seeing one of the preview performances last week, my best friend – also a long-term SNM veteran – and I both started our responses with the same tricky question: did it feel, well, derivative? And we both knew immediately that wasn’t quite the word we were looking for. 

HERE does feel very familiar, and familial: the movement vocabulary shares a great deal with Punchdrunk and for obvious reasons: Kelly Bartnik and Tori Sparks alike both have long histories with the company and contributed a great deal to it; Tori’s movement work also has a visible impact at Third Rail. HERE chooses to embrace its lineages. The setting is dark; there is wonky distorted sound design and garbled radio effects, and carefully perfumed spaces. Aesthetically speaking, if you feel at home in the McKittrick, you’ll very much like the Riley house, and anticipate some of its secrets.

Familiarity of this kind, though, proves to be helpful: the choreography, pleasing though it is, doesn’t feel alien and can instead move toward the background. The storytelling is done primarily by the space and the sharp characterization. With so little time to establish character, world and story, the choices made in HERE are all critical and deliberate: gameplay in the house isn’t for its own sake. The track I experienced gave me a decent sense of the five characters (four of them living), a sense of their conflicts, and a glimmer of what is likely a disturbing backstory; a quick check-in with the other four guests after the show left us all with a slightly more detailed, but purposefully incomplete picture of their world. As a pilot episode, it works perfectly.

The performance space design, I should add, is absolutely top-notch, with a degree of finish and detail I never would have expected from a small, short run. One particularly impressive moment involved the creation of an impromptu space (we’ll call it “the thing in the tent” and HERE audience will know what I mean) that is sort of a Danvers 1:1 on steroids and felt brilliant: it executes so smoothly and segues directly into important reveals from Jack. 

I made the briefest of secret trips for @nodoubtaholic‘s birthday on Saturday.

There is something both comforting and horrific in the way things move on in that place despite changes and absences and additions. We’re all in a loop of sorts, I guess.

1 year ago, around this time, I started having really bad pain in my wrist that spread to my fingers and up my arm, and a few months later, throughout my whole body. Doctors still aren’t exactly sure what’s wrong, and the pain is slightly better overall but I have okay days and terrible ones; pain free days are nonexistent. The pain in my hands, knees, and hips is so bad that it keeps me awake - I sleep a few hours if I’m lucky, not at all if I am unlucky - and no matter what I do, it never really improves.

During this time, I have figured out (and been surprised by) who has my back, who supports me, and who I should have let go earlier than I did. I never realized how much something like this could make me learn to appreciate the people I barely knew who jumped to support and help me - and on the flip side, I was made painfully aware of the fact that some people can’t get their heads out of their asses enough to care when someone else is having a really hard time.

I had to let go of a few important relationships, and take a serious look at others. It has been difficult. On top of that, there’s really no end in sight to the pain, and it takes a lot of willpower (and stubbornness) for me to continue my life as much as I can.

There are still going to be things I’ll never do again, at least not in the same way. The things I love, like going to the McKittrick, and traveling, have gotten exponentially more challenging. I have days where I lay around and feel sorry for myself, and wonder why, on top of depression and anxiety I now have another condition for what could be the rest of my life and I’ll only be able to “manage” it. There are still days where I can’t physically get out of bed. This year has been absolute hell, and even though I’d like to be optimistic and say everything will get better, it’s often hard to believe.