53rd State Press – förlag

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.

This volume collects two plays by Erin Courtney, A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost. The Obie Award--winning Map is a symmetrical play: part interview, part comedy, part horror story. Courtney's plays unfold in a delicate dance of pattern and narration; they ring out their images and meanings as a sequence of bells: complicating, harmonizing, and remapping their senses as they run their idiosyncratic course.

It's easy to dismiss the Holy Ghost People. They travel door-to-door in white sheets spouting pseudoscience about time travel, wormholes, and a new galactic gospel. Most of the town has already laughed them away. But when the Holy Ghost People start to perform "miracles," denial becomes difficult, and conversation quickly shifts to what ought to be done.

A one-act play in which apologies must be made to Chekhov. A one-act play in which there is a blueprint, & that blueprint is ignored entirely. A one-act play in which a decision is made, but it is unclear by or for whom. A one-act play in which the wind has the smallest hands, no, even smaller than that. Over the course of 41 one-act plays—most of them starring the characters ME and YOU—Dalton Day investigates grief, love, anxiety, and loss in this stunning collection of dramatic poetry.

A rabbit cosmogony, a libretto to be sung, spoken, and projected, a radio-play-folk-opera-duck-animation-with-dances, ASTRS is set in the 53rd State of the Union, zone of the sixth chrysanthemum, where Augustus B. Rabbit and Sibyl Kempson meet in a place where the end times can't seem to wrap it up and the middle times hang around eternally. A pre-middle play by 53rd State's founding editor offers a roadmap to the 53rd State and to the troubled state of the present fifty. It should come as no surprise: "in the cosmos," as Keithley writes, "associations ring across disances. In the 53rd state they meet in the corner."

Dark, disturbing, deft, irreverent, and revelatory, Ignacio Lopez’s monologue is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy. Weaving together two very different voices grappling with strikingly similar crises of sexuality and conscience, Severed asks: where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding? What happens when we see ourselves reflected in the monster’s eye?

Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, “continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for.”A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer’s identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again?

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.

In September 2021, playwright/performers Eisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker’s performance ritual, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). In January 2022, they met again to discuss Davis’s installation performance piece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in 2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirror each other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generational trauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given the commodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How to acknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform without being captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth’s bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work—if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

This critical reckoning by a celebrated poet re-envisions what scholarship can offer during times of crisis in the humanities and in our own lives. In his acclaimed 2016 book  Diving Makes the Water Deep , Zach Savich wrote a memoir of cancer that was also a rowdy essay on teaching, the lyric, and poetic friendship. His urgent new book  A Field of Telephones imagines new modes of criticism that can bloom beyond the university and heed the harmonics of the glitch. Through its combination of fictional lectures, performance texts, archival hijinks, and the personal, this book considers how “influence” can offer more than critical ventriloquism and how a “student” is one whose disorientations can reorient the field. Its mock-scholarly and more-than-scholarly modes focus on the life and legacy of the poets Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo and on the peril at the heart of inspiration.

The Dark Girl Chronicles is a ritual-play cycle designed to crystallize in collective memory the stories of three Black women warriors against state violence—Diamond Reynolds, Rachel Jeantel, and Islan Nettles.Part Yoruba or Bantu-Kongo sacred story, part communal ritual, and part documentary-manifesto, the three parts of the cycle—Chronicle X: Windows, Chronicle Y: Sugar, and Chronicle Z: Feathers—use court transcripts, police records, and media coverage to analyze the violent interpretive tactics of white supremacy and to restore these events to their own meanings.Deploying Black feminist technologies of ritual, magic, and spell, The Dark Girl Chronicles traverses deep ocean and deep space, finds difference in the darks of wombs, snail shells, and caves, and holds space for the interiority, vulnerability, and necessary dignity of dark girls.

Futures is an anthology of six new plays written in Arabic, published here in English translation. Including five plays selected from over 500 submissions to Masrah Ensemble’s 2021 Open Call and one by Masrah Ensemble’s former playwright-in-residence, these six texts—by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Nasr Sami, and Leila Toubel—represent a diverse array of voices and styles, and push at the limits of theatrical form and public discourse. The volume features an introduction by theater writer/director/academic Hanan Kassab Hassan along with short introductions to the plays by US-based playwrights Lucas Baisch, Jess Barbagallo, Jordan Baum, Agnes Borinsky, Nazareth Hassan, and Haruna Lee.Sometimes We Remember by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon). Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Nazareth Hassan.A Fornesian diamond of a play that unfolds in a series of seemingly simple domestic and urban scenes, about the lure of dwelling in memories of war.Braveheart by Wael Kadour (Syria). Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Lucas Baisch.A play about a group of friends writing a novel together, in which relationships collapse and get rebuilt through the act of writing. How do you move out of a state of war into a time of presumed stability?Ruby by Leila Toubel (Tunisia). Translated by Hisham Ben Khamsa, with an introduction by Haruna Lee.A rhythmic monologue, lyrical and dark, in which a woman unpacks a life of misogyny and violence as she prepares to meet her daughter for the first time.Uprooting; Or, the Cat and Dog Pizza Chapters by Nasr Sami (Tunisia). Translated by Jonas Elbousty, with an introduction by Jess Barbagallo.A dizzying trip into a world of violence and distortion, by way of the Biblical Song of Songs. In which cats are nailed to walls, and two lovers seek to become one.Eternity by Rim Mejdi (Morocco). Translated by Caline Nasrallah, with an introduction by Jordan Baum.A young woman is stuck on a train, and just wants to get off. An allegorical knot of a play that moves between liveness and video, vernacular and formal Arabic, with interludes from Rimbaud's French.Left Out Gone Bad by Yasser Abu Shaqra (Palestine/Syria), with an introduction by Agnes Borinsky.A Syrian family arrives as refugees in Europe, where life does not resemble what they imagined. Over the course of the play, each member of the family finds themselves backed deeper and deeper into a corner, and “safety” proves a devil’s bargain.

Can you be Black and not perform?This is the question of The Essentialisn’t, a conceptual art installation with award-winning writer and performer Eisa Davis singing for her life in a tank of water, or at the piano in a pasture of hair. A transatlantic undrowning which moves from enslavement through the Harlem Renaissance into the diasporic present, the piece interrogates the racial imaginary with an embrace of interiority and innovation, making space for an uncommodified Black feminine practice of sovereignty and liberation.

To engage with Lieblich’s plays is to become obsessed with how language works, how it works on us, and how we use it to work on others. —Thinking Theater NYC In Mahinerator, an ambitious bureaucrat, speaking in a quasi-English pseudolect, tells his greatliest life story; a story of the banalation of the evilwise, of vacuumic compressulated ecocide.The Barbarians is a loggorheic encyclopedic rambunctious gollywompus of a play concerning speech acts, political power, fractal geometry, eusociality, theater, nonsense, aircraft carriers, cell phone networks, Bifröst, My Heart Will Go On, semiotics, pyramids, and picturesque American normalcy. A composer of language’s skewed longings, these plays by Jerry Lieblich torque and tickle our grammars, taking these jangly, tangling systems as occasions for probing the political structures through which we participate in our and others’ demise.

From the Marrow collects nine ritual/jazz performance texts by SharonBridgforth, including lovve/rituals & rage, no mo blues, dyke/warrior-prayers,blood pudding, con flama, love conjure/blues, delta dandi,River See, and dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show. Rooted inblues and bristling with the voices of ancestors, lovers, aunties, neighbors,and friends, these texts document Bridgforth’s thirty-year practice of deeplistening, collaboration, and care. Shapeshifting, polyvocal, multi-gendered,genre-bending, nonlinear, Bridgforth’s writing innovates form the way the oceancarves the coast: with sensuality, salty humor, aching grief and rage, and withvast, various, and invariable love. The volume includes essays, interviews, andwitnessings by Stephanie L. Batiste, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis PaulineGumbs, Robbie McCauley, Sonja Parks, Sonja Perryman, Stacey Karen Robinson, andNia Witherspoon.

Boys Don't Fight is a rumination onqueer longing, unrest, resentment, voyeurism, vulnerability, hopeless lovetriangles, missed connections, and autonomy, unfurling in lyrical electro-popsongs. This volume collects song lyrics, production photos, essays, conversationswith Giarmo and longtime collaborators, as well as a download code for theaccompanying album.

In some rooms he’s Martin. In othershe’s Martín. Hired by a well-funded arts institution on Chicago’s Northside tocreate a show with Chicago youth about violence on the Southside, Marteen findshimself torn not only by the pronunciation of his name, but by the conflictingneeds of the institution and the young people it believes its “serving,” and bya city in a death struggle with its own divided self. Reaching into his ownhistory, he unearths, with his young ensemble, the story of the 1994 murder ofsoccer star Andres Escobar in Medellín, Colombia, hoping a past-tense allegoryof violence in a deeply divided, faraway city will illuminate violence in thedeeply divided Chicago of today. Carlos Murillo’s brilliant, rigorous play ishaunted and haunting, its meticulously rendered ghosts layered one atop anotherlike history, like lace.

You are ushered by your own desire into the belly of our collective dreaming. She is in-situ, waiting, being, exposed. Even venery has its triangulations. If you mix the pigments yourself the colors will be more vibrant—and still, don't you long for a clarion call? I'm going to read to you for a while, and you're going to like it, yes? Turn taking is a part of the game. I want you to eat it. Eat it all.MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%Real is a transdisciplinary work intersecting with Dance, Theatre, Performance, Music, and Sculpture generated by a multidisciplinary ensemble led by Marcela Michelle. Taking inspiration from Divisionism, Critical and Queer Theories, Kink Play, and the network of experimental performance being made in the Twin Cities, the work is an exercise in scaffolding for ensemble and is curious about reorienting its named relationship to its makers, be they on the stage or in the audience. Border, boundary, discipline, medium, frame, role, position, vantage, viewpoint, yes, no, no but yes, yes but no, I'll do it for you, I like that you like it. The Book is a script, a collection of scores, collected writings on and around the work, and archival images of previous performances.

In 2012, Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl--known collectively as PearlDamour--began visiting five small American towns named Milton. From Louisiana to North Carolina to Wisconsin to Massachusetts, these several Miltons span the country like an earth-bound constellation. Over the course of the past five years, PearlDamour has developed a series of performances, each focused on (and performed in) a particular Milton while yet providing a sense of the whole constellation. Milton includes scripts and photos from PearlDamour’s performances in Milton, LA, Milton-Freewater, OR, and Milton, MA as well as reflections on the process and practice of community-based art making.

Obsessive, persuasive and enduring, Nature Theater has remade the epic form into something newly familiar and contemporary. No Dice is a transcription of the company's four-hour dinner theater event. The dinner is a bologna sandwich and a Dr. Pepper. The theater is made of phone conversations reset into a hyper-energetic physical and vocal register. "A tour de force." -NY Times

1534: John of Leyden proclaims himself the Favorite of Heaven, runs naked through the streets of Munster, Germany, and forms a society free of laws or private property. 1976: John Lydon proclaims himself an “antichrist,” helps launch a movement to “destroy passersby,” and permanently changes popular culture. Coincidence? In Lana Lesley’s graphic adaptation of the Rude Mechs’ stage adaptation of Greil Marcus’s text, Dr. Narrator and the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren recount an alternative history of the 20th century via the Sex Pistols, the Cabaret Voltaire, the May ’68 riots, and a handful of medieval heretics. Lipstick Traces is a graphically gritty and intellectually nervy rendition of a theatrically irreverent and physically ecstatic production of a history of “movements in culture that raised no monuments…movements that barely left a trace.”

Continues Nature Theater's investigation into transcription as epic theater. Zachary Oberzan's exhaustive retelling of David Morrell's First Blood unfurls along a vein of spectacular psychic charge. Simultaneously giving John Rambo's life Homeric form, performing Oberzan's own relationship to the book, and anticipating his planned solo remake of the movie, Rambo Solo obliterates distinctions between the ridiculous and the redemptive.

When You Rise Up collects texts by relentlessly exploratory choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, who engages artistic community in a radical sense, interrogating physical encounter at all scales, from the collaborating performers to the world where the work takes place. Standing alone from their original contexts, these pieces radiate with the physical urgency of a life committed to art and performance.

Montgomery Park, or Opulence is an essay in the form of a building, a performance text in the form of a series of tales out of the archive of a fictional asylum, stories of combination with forms of consciousness beyond the human varieties. Keithley's staging won a 2011 BESSIE Award for Outstanding Production.

Lumberob (Rob Erickson) is a singular phenomenon of language, looping and manic-obsessive performance intensity. Erickson's writing employs a syntax wholly his own, patterning words by working them through a physical obstacle course and so creating a performance text that really undoes any useful distinctions between language and embodiment. Off the Hozzle is lurching, digressing, doing-undoing, and unlike any other play.