Sibyl Kempson – författare

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.

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.

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.

Set in Alabama at the scene of James Agee and Walker Evans's famous reporting, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag brings Sibyl Kempson's attention to the ethical snares of poetic journalism and what it means to work on the land. She interrogates the strange energy of images, both their potential to anesthetize response, and their invitation to be approached as hermeneutic thresholds between visible and invisible orders. Interwoven with sources from Agee and Walker to Sontag, to inscriptions on Assyrian mythological seals, and nested in a set of images from other performances, the play holds forth in its own genre, a bad-ventriloquism visitation seed-eating prayer ceremony with songs. The entire score, composed by Kempson's longtime collaborator Ashley Turba, completes the book.