Arts
Here you'll find some of the plays I've written and performance art pieces I've helped to create.
Bleeding Albina
A short play that asks the question: what if a talk show host followed you around everywhere asking you about your life?
Kaleidoscope
A reading of my full-length play Kaleidoscope for Portland's Fertile Ground Festival. The play asks the question: just how liberal is liberal society, really?
A short play that examines the human cost of urban progress.
Dionysus Addresses the Ghosts of Humanity
A performance art piece about the end of the world. It's post-apocalyptic, sure, but it's kinda funny.
Red Flag
A performance art piece about the post-American collective identity crisis. It's also funny.
Scripts & Scribbles
Various things I've written.
The End
(Previously published in The Dionysian, March 2017)
A scrappy urban alleyway. Concrete walls, bits of rubble, trash strewn. One scraggly bush. Two men enter. Man 1 wears a permanent scowl. Man 2 is relaxed & cheerful. They stop and look about. Man 1 sees a large wooden spool on its side. He turns it over to resemble a table. He takes off a backpack and pulls from it a red cloth. He drapes the cloth over the table and pulls a couple chunks of rubble up to the table to serve as chairs. Meanwhile, Man 2 has gone to the scraggly bush and clipped a couple of sprigs from it. He searches the ground and locates a couple of weedy flowers, which he picks. He reaches into the backpack and pulls out a vase, in which he arranges the bouquet and then places it upon the table. The two men sit. Man 1 pulls out a bottle of something and two glasses. He uncorks the bottle and pours. Pause for a moment while they rest and sip from their glasses.
MAN 1
We had a chance, you know.
MAN 2
We did?
MAN 1
Of course we did! We just never took it.
MAN 2
That’s funny. I always kind of thought we were fucked and we liked it that way.
MAN 1
Humanity is a child who must learn about hot stoves. About touching hot stoves.
MAN 2
Hm.
MAN 1
Which we do. Repeatedly. Touch the stove. Ouch, that’s hot. We touch it again. Ouch, that’s hot. Well now the stove is very fucking hot and we have our tongue pressed against it.
MAN 2
I think you’ve got the wrong frame of reference entirely. The fact is, we’re organic matter that has taken the unlikely step of rising up into a form capable of self- reflection. I’m not sure that’s for the best. Think of Whitman, his views on animals, et cetera. We’re better off being composted to feed the soil.
MAN 1
What we didn’t learn is that the stove is us. We’ve been touching ourselves – not in a good way – the heat being the heat of our own goddamned endless curiosity and drive. The cure is the poison. Is the cure. And so forth. Forever.
MAN 2
Hm.
MAN 1
It’s maddening.
MAN 2
It’s delightful. What grand spectacle. The hero wants something – what is it? Oh yes! To reach the greatest heights. But he cannot, because he’s fucked. What will he do? He’ll build his ladder bigger and bigger, until –
Man 2 gestures with his hand to indicate falling.
MAN 1
Our only hope now is aliens.
MAN 2
Our only hope now is a good cup of coffee and a handjob. Preferably from someone with soft hands.
MAN 1
Or to preserve our DNA in some kind of soluble form that could be reconstituted when... conditions are right.
MAN 2
The coffee should be a medium roast and perfectly steeped. Just a dab of cream. The handjob –
MAN 1
There is no handjob.
MAN 2
The handjob executed with such precision and tenderness as to come from oneself, but from another.
MAN 1
There is no handjob.
MAN 2
And the two combined, the coffee and the handjob, sufficient to send one to depths of feeling and ecstasy previously not even imagined.
MAN 1
There’s always mass suicide. A ritual exit. To avoid the inevitable descent into depravity.
MAN 2
I miss coffee.
MAN 1
Only, most would object. On religious grounds. Or through some misplaced desire for self-preservation.
MAN 2
Yes.
MAN 1
Necessitating a mass slaughter by anyone who gives a shit. Finally use all those dusty old A-bombs.
MAN 2
Nobody wants all that radiation. Think of the flowers.
MAN 1
There’s leaving, but we’ve tried that.
MAN 2
Gardens take time. It would be a shame to completely foul this one upon our departure.
MAN 1
They’ll keep trying, of course. Whoever can bang together a spaceship to go rattle around the galaxy. Until they run out of food and come back.
MAN 2
I think you’re missing the point. We’re all within the gravitational field of something much bigger than us. Both literally and metaphorically, of course.
MAN 1
We may be the only intelligent life.
MAN 2
We’re being drawn in to a conclusion of the species that began the moment we put our eyes in front of our skulls and started grasping at things with our little hands.
MAN 1
In the galaxy, that is. The only intelligent life in the galaxy.
MAN 2
The moment we stole fire from some lightning-struck tree and scratched our first wee wildebeest on that cave wall.
MAN 1
Possibly the universe.
MAN 2
And now, it’s time for us to take our final little monkey-bow and get off the stage so some other creature can take its shot.
MAN 1
What? What other creature is this? Dolphins? Can you seriously imagine dolphins writing books, building cities?
MAN 2
We’ll never know if we don’t get out of the way and let them try. Anyway, we don’t have much of a choice.
MAN 1
We do! We do! We do! Or we did, anyway. Shit.
MAN 2
Even a cup of decaf. And a flirty glance. Maybe a wink.
MAN 1
A wink won’t save us now. We’re fucked.
MAN 2
And we like it that way!
Pause while Man 1 considers this.
MAN 1
Well then, to being fucked.
MAN 2
I'll drink to that.
They toast and drink.
MAN 1
We’d better go. We have a long way yet.
MAN 2
Always a long way with us.
They gather their things into the backpack. Man 2 scatters the flowers from the vase. They exit. Fade lights. End.
Distant Light
(Previously published in The Heart as Origami: Contemporary Buddhist Poets)
Me and Cynthia – that’s my mom – we’re sitting on the couch drinking tea. We’re drinking tea because she doesn’t have any money to buy beer these days, and neither do I, even though I think we’d both really like a beer right now.
I’ve been telling her about this crazy physics stuff they’re coming out with, about how they’ve figured out that light takes the form of either a particle or a wave depending on whether or not it’s being watched. Yeah. And that affects the path it travels because then it either bounces off objects or bends around them. Well, actually, that’s old news now, but the crazy thing is, they’ve also figured out: that this means when you look at a star, you affect the way that star’s light travels, but that light has been traveling for billions of years. The star you’re looking at may not even exist anymore. So, you’re actually affecting the way that light traveled in the past. Yeah.
Which pretty much fucks up the whole way we’ve been thinking about time and space and consciousness. And everything.
So my mother listens to all of this and thinks it’s pretty amazing and all, and then – she’s just quiet for awhile and doesn’t even drink her tea, and then she’s like, “You know, I was just thinking. If that’s all true, then it’s also like, if you look at events in the past and think about them from where you are, you kind of change them. So… I can look back at leaving you and your sister when you were kids, and even though it’s so long ago, it’s not as far back as that starlight. So maybe we can kind of go back and change it just by looking at it. Wouldn’t that be nice, Josh, if we could go back and change that now, just by you and me sitting here talking about it and being together and wanting it to be different? Maybe it doesn’t have to be so tough.”
And she looked at me and I swear, her face was, like, twenty five years old just then, the way I remember her when we lived in the little brown house on Maple when I was six and my sister was seven and Mom used to read Little House on the Prairie to us and if we went to bed on time she’d stay up and make us little rag dolls or something and we’d wake up and they’d be on the pillow next to us, just a little rag doll sewn out of an old t-shirt or something, but we though it was so cool and we never realized how late she must have stayed up to make them even though she had to work all day the next day washing dishes at the bakery and she must have been tired but I never saw her tired and there was just the one time when she sat in the bathtub and cried and wouldn’t stop and my sister and I got scared and got the neighbor woman who sat on the edge of the tub and talked really quiet to my mother and said stuff like ‘red light, green light’ that didn’t make any sense, and we watched from the doorway and were scared and I knew that it was because we wouldn’t behave but I didn’t know how to be better and pretty soon my aunt came and picked up me and my sister and we drove out to her house in the country and stayed for a few weeks and then our aunt sat us down one morning and told us that we wouldn’t be going back to live with our mother, and I lay on my bed afterward and cried for the whole afternoon and nobody could do anything to make me stop.
And we saw our mom on weekends sometimes after, and she’d take us to go see a movie downtown – not some stupid kid’s movie, but a real adult movie, like Gallipoli or Pennies from Heaven or Ragtime, and after we’d go to her apartment by the library and listen to Joni Mitchell records and we’d talk and it was nice, but then we’d go back home to the farm and my chest would be all hollow and scooped out and I wouldn’t know why because I was just a fucking kid, man, and you don’t figure that stuff out when you’re a kid – you just know that it hurts and you don’t know why or what to do about it.
And it was only years later that I found out that she wanted us back, but she was too scared to ask her sister to give us back, so she didn’t. She just thought about us all the time, and cried in her bed, too. And eventually she met another guy and had more kids with him, but she didn’t forget about us, and even though she loved her other kids, they didn’t take our place. Our place was still there somewhere inside of her.
So here we are, twenty years later – me and my mom, who I call Cynthia now, sitting on her old brown couch holding Salvation Army cups full of chamomile tea and talking, and she looks twenty-five again and I realize something. So I say, “Cynthia?” and she says, “Hmmm?” and I say, “What you said just now about being able to go back and change things by looking at them?” and she says, “Yeah?” and I say, “Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.” And she looks at me with her young face and she has a puzzled little smile and she says, “What do you mean?” and I don’t know how to tell her what I see, so I just say, “Nothing, Mom. I love you.” And we finish drinking our tea.