After Hours

Just saw a really cool piece at BoCo on Friday night: my good friend Doug Lockwood directing Marjorie Morgan in a one-woman performance piece called After Hours.  (Actually, I'm not sure if that's the title of the piece, or just literally when it was happening, which is kind of great.)

The rest of this site specific, experimental play is just as unsettling.  Morgan strolls around the beautiful, eerie, wood-carved Albert Alphin library in white jammies.  The audience, which is limited to 30, strolls around with her - sort of a mini "Sleep No More" - while she dances, sings, strums on a ukulele, balances precariously - and with great grace - on bookshelves, talks to the huge portraits of men hanging on the walls and plays a sort of bowling match with those metal, book stop thingys. 

Is she some crazed librarian acting out strange rituals while the library slumbers?  A modern day Mrs. Havisham?  Is she a ghost?  Is she haunted herself?  Are we really here - she interacts with the audience - or inside her dream?

The text is original - a sort of collage - with excerpts and songs from William Shakespeare, Leonard Bernstein, Lennon/McCartney, Hamlisch, Jerry Herman, Meredith Wilson, and Rogers and Hammerstein.

Needless to say, this was all right up my alley: I loved it.