I Hate This (The Silver Collection)

Photo by Anthony Gray Photography

Since 2002, I have performed I Hate This, live and in-person, forty-four times. Is that a lot? I was put into the company of A Christmas Carol in 2024 and over the course of four weeks I put in twenty-nine performances.

A long time ago, I realized this was a piece I would return to for the rest of my life, whether I wanted to or not. But how? I mean, it’s supposed to be a personal piece of storytelling, but the subject matter, stillbirth, is challenging. I’m not afraid of it, the audience is. I cannot blame them.

And how do I make reproducing the play relevant? How do I tell it again, in a manner that is honest, that isn’t just a reproduction of the original? To tell this story so that it is helpful, edifying (edify: instruct or improve) and also entertaining? That attending is not a chore, but a worthwhile experience? And might I suggest, an enjoyable evening?

Every five years since the birth of our first child, I have been able to retell the story in different ways. In 2006 we broadcast a radio drama. In 2011, I paired the piece with another solo performance. In 2016, I had a one night only performance with a few new adjustments. And in 2021 we created the film.

For this year, the 25th birth anniversary of our first child, and to commemorate Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month (October) I will be embarking upon a project I have been desiring to create for years – a house performance.

I Hate This (The Silver Collection) will feature:

• An intimate performance for an audience of ten (10) members only, each evening. 
• A revised, updated text, to reflect the time that has passed. 
• An open bar and homemade refreshments 
• 10% of the admission will go to the Preeclampsia Foundation, whose mission is to “improve the outcomes of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy by educating, supporting and engaging the community, improving healthcare practices, and accelerating research.”

I will be reaching out to interested audience members in September. Please drop a note in the comments if you would like me to contact you.

Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes | BorderLight 2026

Dan Zanes was lead singer of the Del Fuegos and a wild garage rocker and swiller of Miller High Life until he started having kids and that's when he started recording children's music. I, too, had not considered the child audience until I started fathering them.

Fathering. What a terrible verb. I digress.

Faye Hargate and Renee Schilling collaborated on the Visual Theatre Award winning Her Mark for BorderLight 2023 and they (with Joan Hargate and Jeremy Paul) have devised a new exploration of motherhood with the creation of Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes, an original and exploratory art installation for the very, very young.

I felt a bit odd, I knew I would, appearing as an adult without a child escort, but they don't judge. The space had just opened and there were already five kids with their two adults, and Hargate and Schilling, costumed as what appeared to me to be DIY store associates were making suggestions and accommodating needs as the child audience explored and commented and created.

Dan Zanes with my family (2005)

I was provided with stickers I was told I could put anywhere I liked (I put hem up high, there seemed to be no stickers up there for some reason) and was offered a basket of "dream boxes" the team had created previously in collaboration with a CHUH school.

In fact, dreams were a theme, the walls featured trees that asked "Where do you go when you dream?" with answers like, "I hear music in my dreams," and "I see my dog, he is no longer with us."

The night before I had dreamed that we lived in a society where cannibalism was permissible, but it was unseemly to discuss it. You had to be very discreet when disposing of long bones. I didn't write any of this on the trees.

Before I left there was a group activity where our hosts read the Dr. Seuss book which inspired the title of the installation. There were many questions from the children. How did you set this all up? What is that? Are you a rapper?

It's a calming, welcoming room, and the kids I saw appeared very happy to be there. This is an non-ticketed event. I recommend bringing a young person. 

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

On Site-Specific Theater

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025

Let us define our terms.

Dr. Suzy Woltmann defines immersive theatre as “a performance art movement that aims to transform audience members from passive recipients to active participants.” Furthermore, she highlighted features of immersive performance which may include:

• Blurring the line between audience and performer
• Leaving the stage behind
• Including sensory experiences
• Shifting between the personal and the collective

An immersive experience can often be described as site-specific theatre, though those terms are not necessarily mutually inclusive. The folks at the Australian Performing Arts Conservatory states that site-specific theatre “breaks free from the confines of a traditional theatre where actors perform on stage. The performances take place in unexpected locations, from bustling city streets and historical sites to warehouses and parks.” Site-specific performance can:

• Create a more immersive experience
• Add a layer of authenticity and depth to the performance
• Allow creative teams to innovate and experiment with storytelling techniques

Site-specific performance is not, of course, a recent thing. By any basic definition, we may assume theater originated any place people were, and only later did everyone decide it needed to happen primarily in what we call a “theater.”

Sleep No More (2011)

But it is because of this codification of theatrical traditions that producing a play in a non-traditional space became something of a novelty. In early years of this century, for example, Charenton Theatre Co. produced a string of site-specific performances across the city of Cleveland, staging Albee’s Zoo Story on a park bench, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology on a tour of cemeteries, and James McLure’s Lone Star in a number of local drinking establishments.

Site-specific and immersive cross over when they engage the audience in some unique, sensory way. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this was Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which was set in a vast warehouse made to resemble a stately and crumbling hotel through which a masked audience was welcome to freely wander, handling sets and props and even on occasion, the actors – this last was not specifically encouraged, but it happened. A lot.

Inspired by this, a team of us created the Love In Pieces project in 2014, in which we produced Sarah Morton’s play of that name inside an actual house. Due to space limitations, an evening’s audience was between sixteen and twenty people, and they were split into four groups, each group of four or five experiencing one of the four, ten-minute scenes, before being escorted to the next one.

In 2023, the Give Me Your Keys company presented my play Step Nine as part of the BorderLight Fringe. Director James Rankin had asked for a play for two men to be performed in an actual bar, and I provided him one. Thirty or more crammed into the Snug at Parnell’s in Playhouse Square as two actors spoke at normal, human volume, forcing the crowd to lean in, as if eavesdropping on a private conversation.

I had not planned to apply for BorderLight myself this year, until I read the application and found this note about submitting a site-specific adaptation.

Site-specific Adaptation
Are you willing to adapt your performance to a site-specific location? For example, an alley, a hotel room, a park, a car, a loading dock, or a public street. Artists are also encouraged to suggest a site-specific adaptation/production. (emphasis mine)

Nicholas Chokan, Jason Leupold
Step Nine (2023)
BorderLight Theatre Festival

A hotel room? I have spent the past year writing a script that takes place in a hotel room! I took it as a challenge – a challenge to them. If they could really find a hotel room in which to produce my new play, then by God, I would present my play there.

And so, I am happy to announce that my new play, The Right Room, will be performed as part of the BorderLight Theater Festival 2025 this summer, and produced in a room at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland in Playhouse Square. One single hotel room will represent four different hotel rooms, in four different cities, in four different eras, to tell one very epic narrative. Epic – but intimate.

Source: 

“What Is Immersive Theatre?” by Suzy Woltmann, Backstage, May 8, 2023
“The Role of Site-Specific Theatre in Contemporary Performance Art,” Australian Performing Arts Conservatory, September 19, 2024

Pandemonium 23

Saturday night was my tenth experience at CPT’s Pandemonium. This does not even include the time I sent the actor-teachers to conduct the Where the Wild Things Are residency with a throng of partying adults.

I have written short plays, I have performed in plays written by others. Last year’s experience was good, and I was very happy with not only how James and Sarah performed Here’s To You, Mrs. Robinson but also how well it was received. The next day, however, I developed Covid symptoms and though it didn't time out that I contracted the illness there, it was very likely I shared it, which was upsetting to me. I decided to sit it out this year.

But then Melissa Crum contacted me about participating in a piece she was directing and I said, well, why not? And I am very glad I did.

The Heart in the Wind was conceived by Raymond Bobgan, and while I will refrain from breaking down exactly how it worked (not my tale to tell, and besides, as they say, you had to be there) a team of mechanicals focus on a single party goer, in a private space, and invent a poem specifically for them which is then shared with a larger audience.

Missy asked me to be the person who invited people into the tent, and it was I who interviewed these subjects. I understood why she asked me to play this part, because this is what I do. My experience as an actor-teacher, and in coaching actor-teachers means I have a skill at asking total strangers meaningful questions about themselves.

It was a warm, powerful, and immersive experience. One of our subjects was a self-described mother and caregiver, who was surrounded by her husband and three big, adult sons and the experience brought joyful tears and embraces.

I had my own personal, immersive experience during dress rehearsal (on the night we were too engaged in our own work to engage any other of the offerings) when I read a children’s story to a mermaid. The experience brought me to tears. I haven’t been so moved since the witches’ house at Sleep No More.

My own work has been largely cerebral, and it has been challenging for me to think outside of crafting scripts for actors to learn and speak – though there is power in that, as evidenced by Step Nine at BorderLight last month. But these opportunities, for audiences of one, they can resonate, they last, like a fondly remembered dream, and I wish I could tap into that power. For that I may need to right collaborator, and I think I know who they might be.

Savory Taṇhā in Performance (Thursday)

Brian & Zyrece

Yesterday the New York Times published an essay with the unfortunate headline, Digital Theater Isn’t Theater. It’s a Way to Mourn Its Absence by Laura Collins-Hughes. Journalists and columnists don’t usually get to choose their headlines, there are people who specialize in that -- and a good thing, too, try writing one.

Unfortunately, while the mourning may be real, the phrase “digital theater isn’t theater” is a statement I have to take issue with. And why wouldn’t it be? I am currently the writer/director of a piece of live, if digital, theater.

Collins-Hughes accurately describes the thrill of live theater so; “Bodily immersed in an experience, sharing a single space, we emerge at the finish of those performances imprinted with sense memories.” Yes, we do. It’s why some of us chose this path, as opposed that of movies or television. It’s why I have spent the better part of two decades working on behalf of students to bring live performance right into their classrooms, another mission which has been suspended for the duration.

“Immersed.” That word makes me shudder. Remember immersive theater? An entire popular genre rendered suddenly extinct. They may try to open Broadway, but Sleep No More isn’t rousing any time soon.

And yes, we have enjoyed the recorded dramas that has been made available to us, especially the highly-anticipated Hamilton movie. But they really are just movies, aren’t they?

Hillary & Zach

“Even the Hamilton movie,” Collins-Hughes remarks, “a thrilling and democratizing testament to the power of stage performance, can’t capture the soul of theater, because that soul lives in the room.”

We saw it, we may even have watched it at the same time as LMM and the entire company the evening it debuted, joining in on a nation-wide Twitter commentary, a virtual lobby in which we could compare notes and share our thoughts and feelings.

But even in spite of this opportunity to commune over a piece of theater, even one as professionally executed as that, it was still only the document of a live performance, and not the thing itself.

Which brings me to Savory Taṇhā (sixteen short plays performed by a rotating ensemble), produced by Cleveland Public Theatre to be performed via Zoom, and enjoyed by a live audience of viewers. Not to be archived, not to be seen again. To heighten that sense of immediacy, each night different members of the five person ensemble will be performing different roles from the same sixteen scripts.

We had our first performance tonight, and it went very well. We had a wonderful audience, somewhere between thirty and forty people. They get to see and greet each other before the performance, and also after. It is true, audience mics and cameras are turned off for the performance, so we miss out on any possible laughs or other audience reactions, a necessary sacrifice.

The post-show discussion, however, was very nice, and a warm validation of what I was hoping to accomplish. They commented on the connection between actors, and the great intimacy. In rehearsal I emphasized how, in spite of its many limitations, this medium provides an opportunity for intimacy and closeness that a live performance in front of a hundred audience members cannot, and that we should take advantage of that.

Anne

One commented on how though each character has a unique voice, they are still people that you know personally. And that some of them are you.

Finally, it was so great to see colleagues and friends I have made who I have never met in person, but with whom we have shared work, audience members watching from Virginia, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and having the opportunity to share this work with them. Oddly enough, I am currently in North Carolina.

And I challenge you to tell me what we're doing isn’t theater.

UPDATE: Cleveland Public Theatre presents the Zoom Premiere of "Savory Taṇhā (sixteen short plays performed by a rotating ensemble)" featuring Anne McEvoy Zyrece Montgomery,  Zach Palumbo, Brian Pedaci & Hillary Wheelock, February 17 - March 6, 2021.

Source: Digital Theater Isn’t Theater. It’s a Way to Mourn Its Absence (The industry’s show-must-go-on smile masks a harder truth: that there is no substitute for the live interaction between performer and audience) by Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times (7/8/2020)

Love In Pieces (execution)

Orpheus & Eurydice

The proposal that I made was simple. Present Sarah Morton's Love In Pieces in an actual house. An intimate setting, for a small, select number of people.

In late fall, I had opened the proposal up to those actor-teachers who were available and interested. They all were. We held meetings at the house to discuss, somewhat by consensus, exactly what shape this production would take.

The size of the audience was dictated by the smallest room - the bathroom - where four, perhaps five people could comfortably stand and watch the scene.

The play is made of four scenes. I knew from the 1998 production (which, yes, I have on VHS) that the scenes might range from ten to twelve minutes in duration. We could lead audiences of four from one room to another, with each scene performed simultaneously, four times, once for each party.

Who would lead them? We would require "guides" ... and lo, we had guides. We should have a Host, to receive "guests" but also to act as front of house, for the duration of the performance.

Serving drinks, this was a no-brainer. Guests would be asked to check their cellphones, to avoid interruptions or distractions. Inspired by Sleep No More, each guest would be provided a domino mask, and be instructed not to speak during the performance.

Finally, we would require some way of allowing each scene to start at the same time. The shorter scenes would require a post-scene "event" at some "staging area" in the house. One which would contribute to the mood, not distract from it. Not break any boundaries. Not just seem like time filler.

There would be dancing, chocolate and alcohol. Guests would be encouraged to write secret messages. They would get their feet wet (literally).

Also, Andrew suggested some friends he had at Oberlin, musicians who might be interested in playing before and after the performance. A live duo, piano and bass. Incredible.

The company met, and grew, with new members added as we discovered we needed them. Including the musicians, that came to sixteen. We came together just a few times at the end of last year, and in January, with a plan to begin rehearsal in March. Everyone was made responsible for their own scene. I had made my desire for this event clear, and they understood.

I am at a place in my life where it feels like I am constantly surrounded by competent, talented and motivated artists that I can trust. It is a heart-bursting feeling.

Cupid & Psyche

We sent email invitations, inviting a select audience to a "private house party". With a company of sixteen, we could each only invite a handful of guests, and put together a list that seemed appropriate. Someone would inevitably be left off, but there were no arguments among the company. We never argued about anything.

How best to describe how it all came off? People were delighted. They were amazed. They were surprised. We did receive a few notes the first night (there were only three performances) that we immediately incorporated into the next.

We, the performers were also surprised. We haven't really sat down to debrief yet (we really should do that) but we did have the chance prior to the performances to perform each of our scenes for each other. I was so happy to see each of them in these realistic settings.

I had cast myself as Antony again, this time hopefully with the middle-aged "presence" I had been lacking in my late-20s. My acting partner and I had the chance to perform the same ten-minute scene four times in a row in quick succession, to entirely different audiences of five or six. Each time we became bolder and the scene grew, and grew. It was such a rewarding experience.

What we, the actors missed, and would never receive, was a sense of what our guests experienced. Each party would track the play differently, maybe starting in the bathroom and ending in our bedroom - which meant moving from horror to hilarity. Or starting in the attic and ending in the basement - from commitment to disillusion.

All guests were informed the dress would be "cocktail formal" which might have been setting the bar a bit high, but we were all delighted how festive everyone looked. It did seem appropriate.

After Orpheus and Eurydice have their moment in the Underworld (the basement, with sick red and green lights) the guests were led to a kitchen. Suddenly Orpheus/Andrew begins to sing a haunting love song, that warbled up the steps - between each scene we could hear him, beneath the floorboards - and guests might dance. Is that Eurydice further off singing harmony? Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't.

Andrew had written the song just for this production. As with Hades and Persephone, all were moved.

Guests responded:

"Heartbreaking, heart-warming and hilarious." - L.

"A theater girl of many years ... last night felt like the first time." - S.

"A crazy mixture of voyeurism and live action game of CLUE." - J.

"I dreamt of teeth, sheets with words on them, wings, camels, elephants and the river Styx while Miles played trumpet on a cloud." - D.

"I cried in a kitchen dancing with strangers." - S.

And so we concluded, opened and closed within a fortnight, all on our own dime with no expectation of return but the response of those invited. I felt I had been most rewarded, receiving this opportunity to indulge in the fantasy of getting a second-chance to interpret a much-beloved script on your own terms, to redeem a concept you held privately in your own mind and then to discover that the picture you had was right, that it could actually be like that, and that others could also be touched by it.

Only, and I dearly hoped this would be the case, so too might be the playwright. I am a great fan of Sarah's work, and have been grateful to act in or direct several of her plays. When I asked permission last fall to present Love In Pieces, she said yes, but that didn't mean I wasn't nervous about her response to the final product, especially one as experimental as this. So she gets the last word:

Sarah Morton: "The entire experience - the live music, the beautiful acting, the creaky stairwells, the enchanting silent interludes - made me feel like I was walking through a fever dream, which is exactly how it should be."

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Love In Pieces (play)

Love In Pieces is a short play, written by Sarah Morton. When Cleveland Public Theatre had a new plays festival, it won the top prize, the Chilcote Award, in 1997. With this honor came a full production the following season, and premiered at Cleveland Public Theatre in February, 1998. I was an actor in the company.

This 40-minute work consists of four scenes, depicting famous couples from mythology and literature: Antony & Cleopatra, Laertes & Ophelia, Orpheus & Eurydice and Cupid & Psyche. Each scene departs from its traditional narrative to paint original portraits of love in crisis.

The playwright makes clear in her stage directions that these are not four separate plays. For example, the set should remain simple, each scene resembling the other, to create what she calls a "dreamlike fluidity." Also, though she concedes the play could be performed by eight actors, or "two very versatile ones," she believes the play works best with four actors playing each of the younger and older roles.

So it was in 1998, where I and Triste Crawford played the first and third scenes, and Doug Rossi and Michelle Pristash the second and fourth scenes. Cleveland Public Theatre promoted the work as an (odd) choice with which to celebrate Valentine's Day. Our costumes and Oliver Sohngen's set were largely white, with red accents, the set like a wedding cake, or more like a bisected cheese wheel.

Doug Rossi (Laetres) & Michelle Pristash (Ophelia)

Critical response to Sarah's work was strong, the Free Times calling the show "both post-modern and old fashioned" and "smart and sweet." The Plain Dealer praised her for having "a gift for using both the visual and verbal elements of theater to create complex, striking work."

Scene Magazine spared little restraint, and with this work sincerely called Sarah Morton, "a nascent playwriting genius."

Each performer received uniformly positive notices ... with one interesting exception. Plain Dealer critic Marianne Evett noted that "David Hansen does not have enough presence and command as the old warrior Antony." Cleveland Public Theater made the mistake in 1995, when I was not yet twenty-seven, to cast me (in a different production) as a fifty year-old former Marine. Only twenty-nine, I agree that I made a young and scrawny Antony. More on that later.

Suffice it to say, the show was successfully produced, and I was very happy to be part of that.

Poster, CPT (1998)

As for Love In Pieces, it was produced one more time, produced by a third party for the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. The best that can be said about this version is that nytheatre.com recognized strength in Morton's writing, but that there were serious issues with the director who cast herself in all four female roles, acting against a single male partner. These actors had apparently little chemistry and the performance included breathtakingly long scene breaks.

Shooting bull in the rehearsal hall last fall (continuing yesterday's post) I remembered this play. Four scenes, two set in bedrooms, one in a bathroom, the fourth one the road out of the Underworld. The CPT production was presented in the cavernous former ballroom that is the Levin Theatre. True, it was in the round, which was exciting, but hardly intimate.

Each scene a two-hander, three couples and one set of siblings. Impotence, abuse, disappointment, doubt. You can make these feelings span the distance between character and witness, but what if you closed that gap, made the audience need to lean in, to listen carefully, or make them truly feel they are walking in on something they shouldn't be seeing?

These are the personal moments we all feel in every relationship, that we desperately work to keep secret. Set them in their natural habitat ... what would that be like?

Except for the road out of Hell. That would take some imagination.

Anyway, that was my proposal. I offered it to the company. You want to put on a show, this is the show I am offering, because then I would believe in it. And they all jumped on board.

Tomorrow: Love In Pieces (execution)

Love In Pieces (concept)

It is a common refrain among actor-teachers in the residency program, the suggestion that we put on a show!

"We should stage a showcase," one suggested my first year, like it's the most natural thing in the world. They are young, and energetic, with no children, no need to sleep, nor any previous experience producing any kind of event.

I have been a producer, in my fashion, and I hate slap-dash amateur shit. You can do good work on the cheap, but that's the point - the work has to be good. All of it, from the moment your guests enters until after they depart. Expectations raised must be expectations exceeded, and so on.

I never rose to seriously consider any of these calls to "put on a show". When I was an actor-teacher, I knew I had to concentrate on that work, and had time for little else. As their supervisor, I know they need to concentrate on their work, and have time for little else.

And yet, for the past thirteen years, the same refrain. "Let's put on a show!" Mickey Rooney is dead, get back to work.

This past fall, however ... we were taking a break from rehearsal and Andrew says, "We should put on a show." Ugh. Come on, man? What? Where? Be specific. You don't put on a show for its own sake, you have to believe in it.

After Sleep No More, Emily, James and I had dinner in Chelsea. The subject came up - we should do an immersive show. That would be so much fun. Sure. So is Disneyland. I put it out there - okay, what would we do?

That was the stumper, where it all fell down. Everything each of us suggested would really just be a site-specific play, no different from any number of shows staged at CPT or the 78th Street Studios. The audience might stand, or be guided from one space to another. But it would still be: We, actors. You, audience. In a theater, even if it was some kind of non-traditional one.

The most non-traditional space perhaps, more unusual than a cemetery or an abandoned hotel, is a private residence. Some person's home or apartment or condo, into which strangers (or near-strangers) have been invited. Especially when the expectation has been raised that this will be some kind of special event. Not something informal. A house, but not a house. A performance space.

In the past several years I had been fortunate enough to experience performances of I Dreamed of Rats and It Was a Set-Up in a single room of a private residence with a limited audience. You felt you were part of something special, that you receiving a gift.

Andrew said, "we have a house." Of course, he doesn't have a house, three actor-teachers have been renting a place on the Near West Side. A small house, not a large house. Not even as large as my house, and my house is not that large.

Questions to be answered; What is the point in performing a play that close to a tiny audience, if the story you tell is mundane? If it is private, it must be personal. If it is close, it must be intimate.

And then I remembered Sarah Morton's Love In Pieces.

Tomorrow: Love In Pieces (play)

Sleep No More (play)

My companions at Sleep No More, James and Emily, reported strange, performance-induced dreams the following night. I had no such dreams that night. In fact, it took two days to decompress following that event and to truly sort things out.

I do not normally reflect immediately upon emotionally-effecting events. I can say good-bye to someone I know I will never see again, and be sincere and even wistful, but never cry, not then. That comes later when I am suddenly surprised by a reminder of their being and the full weight of loss and sorrow crash upon me like a fool.

We saw the show on Friday. Our final performance in New York was last Saturday. We packed up and departed on Sunday. James slept for a couple hours in the early afternoon and I drove in silence, and that was when I had the chance to think. I thought about everything, the previous ten days -- the whole summer, really -- and all of it rolled together into one big thing.

This was a theater festival for the record books, if because this time I was not alone. Very little downtime, if I did not choose to act, then someone was choosing an action for me. I did not go from point A to point B without stopping at points C, D & F to meet one or another friend, colleague or family member. So many places, people and things.

And then there was the witch, or nurse, whatever she was. The one who chose me. Because that's part of the attraction, you know? That's what the people hope for, it's not about the one-on-one performance experience. You could get that in one of the open rooms just because no one else happens to be there at the time. When one of them chooses you ... well. That means there's something special about you, right? Even if you are wise enough to know that there isn't. You can't help it.

It was entirely by chance, because I knew these things happened, but it still took me entirely by surprise. It happened like this:

There is this corner room, with a platform elevation, all the walls floor to ceiling painted in black, I passed through it quickly once, but heading through again saw a nurse, a brunette, writing something on the wall. I went and stood next to her. She was writing  the same thing over and over again.

The Thane of Cawdor
The Thane of Cawdor
The Thane of Cawdor

That's when I assumed she must be a weird sister. (Patrick Stewart's recent TV version of Macbeth featured witches in the guise of nurses, too.) The music changed, she stiffened, and walked out of the room. I followed, as did many others, through the branch-maze, but then we encountered another witch, the red-haired one.

They stared at each other, but then she looked at me. Unconsciously, I had put my left hand over my heart. Was that what she noticed, that I was lost in it? That was when she offered her hand.

As I said, I won't describe what happened when she took me by the hand and led me into her little room ... except for this, because this was most troubling.

Near the end of our time together, in that little room, she again took my by the hand, and held me hard. Then she leaned back in her chair, holding me to the length of her entire arm, trembling and shaking me. She sighed piteously, and just I thought she was going to pull me off my seat, she yanked me close and whispered in my ear.

That done, she let me go, and showed me out the door, and as I took the last step turned to see her slowly close the door behind her, and to the last the light of her eyes were bent on me.

This final image has been blazed into my thoughts, as though it were a lost memory of something I had once experienced, some haunted, familiar recollection. It took an entire week before I finally realized where this had happened before.

Oph.
He tooke me by the wrist, and held me hard,
Then goes he to the length of all his arme,
And with his other hand thus ore his brow,
He falls to such perusall of my face
As a would draw it, long stayd he so,
At last, a little shaking of mine arme,
And thrice his head thus wauing vp and downe,
He raisd a sigh so pittious and profound
As it did seeme to shatter all his bulke,
And end his beeing; that done, he lets me goe,
And with his head ouer his shoulder turn'd
Hee seem'd to find his way without his eyes,
For out adoores he went without theyr helps,
And to the last bended their light on me.

- HAMLET Act 2, Scene 1

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

I Dreamed of Rats (play)

Terrence Cranendonk
"I Dreamed of Rats"

For the past several years, artists have been leaning on the boundaries of live performance by creating interactive or intimate theatrical events, plays where the audience either has a (sometimes very limited) choice in the manner in which they observe or engage with the performance, or are made part of the performance itself in some creative fashion.

One of the most recent, much-ballyhooed productions in 2011 has been the arrival in New York City of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, in which an entire hotel is the setting for a remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Emphasis is placed little on the text, and more on the mood and atmosphere. Audience members wear masks, watching as actors murder, party and have sex right in front of them -- and the audience is permitted to get as close to the action as they like (so long as they don’t touch anyone.) One review noted how audience members would pick up things to look at them, like discarded letters, or rummage through cabinets or cases, and discover something relevant everywhere they did.

Over ten years ago I heard of the Neo-Futurists staging their version of Crime and Punishment, where every participant (audience member?) was handed a portable cassette tape player -- like I said, over ten years ago -- and had to follow whatever instructions were given them through their headphones. Which room to walk to next, whether to act as accused or judge. Each audience member went in on their own, though they may find themselves in a room with another audience member, whom they most likely did not know, playing their part in that moment’s scenario.

Nick Denny & I
"Voice In Head"

Nick, my brother Denny and I joined the audience of Voice-In-Head at the Theatre Garage during the 2003 Minnesota Fringe which followed the same model only with absurdist results. We had minidisc players (things change) and were given instructions to carry out throughout the proceedings. My brother told a surprisingly funny joke, considering he is very bad at telling stories, and Nick apparently had two minutes to tell the audience anything he wanted, and chose to praise me and my overwhelming talent and general goodness, and that if everyone that night saw just one more show the the Minnesota Fringe, it had better be I Hate This, which was opening the next evening.

 
I didn’t hear any of this, my brother asked me later if that embarrassed me or if I was moved or anything because I had this frozen mask on my face the entire time Nick was lauding my glory. I had to admit that for the entire two minutes this was going on I was receiving complicated instructions about how it was soon necessary for me to leap up, swirl around the room and deliver the worst fake-Shakespearean monologue I could muster.

Even more recently, the concept of salon performances have swept the theater world. Not simply the type of play where actors perform for an audience of one (although that is also a big deal deal right now) but situations where an actor or small company holds a performance in their own home.

The first I became aware of such an idea was in the early 90s when I first learned of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which he introduced to select audiences in an apartment near Seventh Avenue. Wow. That’s exclusive, I thought. I wonder who was there. Given the opportunity to experience such a thing, I would not pass it up. Strange that I never had the nerve to do it myself.

Because really, I feel there is an emotional leap required to attempt such a thing, even now that it has become en vogue. And it has to be artistically requisite. A solo performance, sure, but that seems arrogant in the extreme. I have thrown a party where you have to sit quietly while I talk about me for an hour. A narcissist’s wet dream.

Last year I attended a performance of Kirk Wood Bromley’s It Was a Setup … performed for an audience of 20 in his living room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was an open, advertised performance, but only if you had a reservation would you receive the address. A play for three, a domestic drama, it was perfectly suited to the realist, well, real space and the confined proximity to the performers.

Yes, it took me twenty years to find and attend a salon performance.

A few weeks back my wife and received a Facebook invitation to Terence Cranendonk’s I Dreamed of Rats. Terry has been working on this piece for over fifteen years, a one-hour, solo adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General. We attended last night, arriving just in time, at his lovely home in Akron, and joined an audience of eight for a startlingly good event. Terry has always been a member of the physical theater, and he is a joy to watch in performance. Surprise is humor, and his work consistently leaves me surprised and delighted.

And, as most nourishing artistic experiences do, last night’s event left me hungry, wondering what I will do next to fill it.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign!