What Life is All About!

We are doing a new piece at the Abbie Hoffman Died for Your Sins Fest. Which has been our habit for many years now. We usually do something we haven't done before, although, all of the pieces we have done have had a certain similarity, you could probably string them all together into some kind of grand narrative.  Someone told us that we do "interpretive theater" by which I think they meant you need to hire an interpreter to explain what it's about.  I don't know, it always just comes out the way it comes out. Maybe that's a flaw or a feature. I'm pretty Zen about it. We do what we do.

This year, the piece is called "Shimmerings," but it started out as "Dead Poe," but I thought that title just gave too much away.  It's sort of inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, and we incorporated some of his poems and other writings into the piece.  I was thinking about how the great man Poe ended up in the gutter, out of his head, and that kind of gave me a starting point.  Poe wrote an an amazing little tract called "Eureka" which is some kind of illuminated document, and sort of resembles "string theory." 

"Eureka" is either brilliant, or just maybe the kind of document someone with an advanced mind and lots of opium might write.  Anyway, we work in some of the "Eureka" text too.  It all has put me in a very speculative and philosophical state of mind.  Running thru the text, memorizing the lines, and I have been tracking with Mr. Poe. And it makes me all wonder what this life is all about. Not sure about that either. Which I guess really is the general theme and gist of our theater work. No one really knows anything about the important things, there is mystery that underlies everything...