Sibyl Kempson – författare

A play meant to challenge our normalized expectations of cause and effect, to suggest post-logical incoherence as the basis of human motivation, feeling, and violence, and to threaten our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater and identity as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.

By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinventsas many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.” In this work, a string of financial, maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley—referred to in this production as Maery S.—to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall  in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.

Joyce Cho Plays collects five plays by Scott Adkins, Kelly Copper, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson, and AmberReed. Ludicrous, lyrical, weird and loving, these plays have in common a totaldisregard for realistic manifestation of their extravagant, poetic scenarios. Dedicatedto proposing solutions for new plays not written with a traditional dramaturgyor staging syntax, the five playwrights of Joyce Cho pursue experiments thatchallenge the conventions of playwriting as she is known. In the words of Mac Wellman, “Thefive playwrights of Joyce Cho—Scott Adkins, Kelly Copper, Karinne Keithley,Sibyl Kempson and Amber Reed—are among the most exciting, imaginative andprofound theater writers in our time, in any time. Joyce Cho is a genius, and agenial one. No one is thinking as deeply and as complexly on what our theateris and is not; nor on what she could be. I do not understand the work of thesewriters in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret ofthe forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time. Paythem heed."The volume includes: RunningCommentary No. 4 by Scott Adkins, Christmas Cracker by Kelly Copper,Do Not Do This Ever Again by Karinne Keithley, Zeit af derKurbisGeistNachten by Sibyl Kempson, and The Grand Kindness by AmberReed.

Two forays into the damp, weird soil of ghosts, curses, and the roots and cousins of American language. Ich, Kurbisgeist, an agricultural vengeance play for Hallowe'en, is written in an oolde and whheurd variant of Amer-English. The three paranormal playlets of The Secret Death of Puppets are composed in "Fraunch," English, and a Nordic-Latin homonculus language of the undead.