Tomorrow I leave with Meg for Philadelphia, where we will see a performance of my play Edmonton, or Come From Out of the Stocks, Elizabeth.
I began writing this play in late 2018, on a director friend’s suggestion that I whip something up for his horror theatre company. It came close to be being produced here and there, by this company and that– how fortunate for me that none of those chances worked out, and that it can now premier (in a fresh and cleanly composed draft) under the deep and observant direction of my friend Sarah Billings!
I wrote a note for the program last night. It was thrilling.
“I love this play so dearly and I think of it so constantly, that it sometimes seems to me less like a play and instead like a velvet-lined jewelry box in which I’ve put a piece of my soul. The Child Ballads, the films of Cronenberg, Barker, Jarman, and Żuławski, the plays of the English Renaissance, cowboy ballads and blues songs and IWW jingles and all the times in my life I felt like I had to turn back and head out of town. It’s all in there. Could you tell?
We enjoy lampooning Polonius for his ridiculous coinage of the ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’ genre. In returning to Edmonton over the years, and in gradually imbuing it with so many of my pet fascinations, I may have accidentally created the first ‘tragical-comical-historical-romantical-horrifical-fantastical-Brechtian-Jarmanian-get-on-out-there-and-start-loving-each-other’ play.”
O! many years of happy days, my boys.