I am a Brooklyn-based writer & performer interested in imagery--not visual/media imagery, which there's plenty of in our daily lives--but poetic imagery.  I am interested in the pictures each of us create in our minds as we read or listen to beautiful language. 

My performance texts fall into two categories. 

1: Poems that are whole on the page but which I choose to extend into a creative space that illuminates them (rather than illustrates them) with action, voice, object, sound.   One example is  the text-excavation/audio project she considers his question in fragments of verse.  Here I took a long text I wrote, excised it into a series of fragments, then recorded myself reading the fragments which now make a new, strange kind of sense.   "A few words/you'll be lucky/left/bleak/to be loved/is not long"--the process of fragmentation transformed a personal essay into a musing on the erosion of passion, text, and meaning through time.  The link includes images of the text, as well as the recording.

2.  Plays of images--poetic images.  Many readers find the imagery in my plays abstract, but to me it is actually very concrete...resonating with a depth of emotional energy that normal language usage can not match (think: dream imagery).  I sometimes think of my plays as Chekhov turned inside-out.  Actors working on a Chekhov play craft an emotional line/subtext so that they can convincingly  inhabit the plot structure.  My plays need director and actors to create a theatrical event line/physical score to convincingly inhabit a highly-organized, emotionally-evocative image structure.  Emotional subtext is built into imagery...so for my plays, the actor's work maybe isn't communicating the emotion, but the image itself, letting the image act on the audience's imagination.??? 

 
Here is an example of  "dialogue" from (stillness)-- a play about  Agnes, who is dying, her two sisters, a home-health nurse, and a doctor who is also a wolf.  This play was a finalist in the Jane Chambers Feminist Performance Text competition. 

Or...script Intimate Things: in which Swell Henry wrestles with passion, mortality, God--through the personae of Heloise & Abelard.  This play has a very traditional looking structure (three acts)...but it approaches its subject in an unusual, non-narrative way.  Act I consists of 20 or so brief dialogues played by Heloise & Abelard as  Swell Henry watches.  They are peculiarly alienated erotic "fantasies".  In Act II, Swell Henry gives a slide-show about the lovers.  The theme of his slide show is:  "What does life look like after passion has past?"  The slide-show ends with a stand-off between the actual Heloise & Abelard as Swell Henry puts on his coat.  Act III is a monlogue: Swell Henry, the quintessential love-lorn soul, winds up telling his troubles to an empty bar at the bottom of the Empire State Building. 

Here's the end of Act II, as Swell Henry finishes his lecture.

A three minute clip of me in Act III: Swell Henry in the empty bar contrasts himself with the image of "The Staircase Genius."  (he's just climbed to the top of the empire state building in search of God...)

Right now, I'm starting to imagine a solo performance--a love-story masked with Pierrot.  The text is a mix of verse-like stage-directions, monologue, fragments, and an old-fashioned Harlequinade!  To transition from writer to performance-maker, I'm scrap-booking the text...cutting it up, pasting it with images (Picasso & Gris depicted Pierrot as personae for the artist in the modern age)--this scrapbook might evolve into a toy theater  for the performance itself.  Here's one page from this evolving performance text: