Bananas

I'm drinking coffee that is "bananas foster" flavored right now.

True coffee connoisseurs, I'm sure, are horrified at such an idea.

But damn, it's good!

Very banana

-ey.

Hysteria has opened to preview audiences this weekend, and it's so helpful/informative to have an audience responding to the comedy. 

This is a strange lull in the middle of the storm: rehearsals are over, but we still have yet to open.

There are still things to work on, but they are technical/non-actor for the most part.

There's this really neat event that is supposed to happen onstage, for example, that hasn't happened yet due to some sort of gremlin somewhere.

You wouldn't really know it didn't happen if you were in the audience.

But, of course, WE know.

And, of course, you never really stop working/discovering/finding out new things until the play has actually closed.

And sometimes even after that...

So anyway, I have to jump back into other projects now that Hysteria is up and running.

Began writing a ten minute play for the Huntington.

They are re-vamping the cell phone plays they did last year for a festival with the ART and ICA.

(Note: A cell phone play is a play you listen to on your cell phone.  VERY different from a Twitter play.)

They invited us all to do it again, which was nice of them.

New this year: they got $ from somewhere to actually pay us a little bit!

Hooray!

I am going to spend that money on snack cakes and spray paint.

The NY Times said today that we will live forever on the Internet.

Whether we like it or not.

So, if I were to keel over right now, my last thoughts to the world would be about Bananas Foster Coffee.

And really: there could be a worse legacy.

I read  - somewhere, during the big MOMA retrospective of her work last year -  of a piece by the performance artist Marina Abramovic.

She stood perfectly still in a space amidst all these different objects and invited the audience to "apply" them to her body in some way.

Amongst the objects:

a scalpel. 

Scissors. 

But also a flower. 

Cotton balls.

And apparently the audience began to fight.

Because some of the audience members wanted to stab her with the scalpel, etc.

To hurt and/or maim and/or murder her.

Because they had been invited, somehow, to do so.

By her.

And the other audience members had to restrain them.

And all the while, Marina Abramovic stood perfectly still.  Helpless.  Defenseless.

A strange position she put herself in: to trust a roomful of strangers.

Which I guess is what the piece was about, in part:

To illuminate what might the only thing holding some people back from committing truly nasty deeds:

Permission.

Which is a really creepy, disturbing thought.

Like that experiment with the guy in a lab coat telling people to "continue" pushing the buttons while someone screams in pain from an adjoining room.

Or like when Kitty Genovese was murdered for over an hour in a parking lot, while all her neighbors watched from their windows above.

And no one called the police.

I'm not sure where this is going.

Just trying to get ideas for the play, I suppose.

Sorry.

I think I just drank too much coffee.

Bananas.  Foster.  Flavored.  Coffee.

This year, my cell phone play is about a woman wandering thru the South End, tripping her brains out on some sort of psychiatric drug.

And Lip Balm.

And James Bond films.