Restless Eye: Text for the Advanced Beginner Group

Note: This text was written in a highly collaborative mode, and includes concept notes, observations, and contributions from designers and choreographer as well as performers, who must all be lavished with credit. They are: David Neumann, choreography and direction; performers Andrew Dinwiddie, Kennis Hawkins, Neal Medlyn, Jeremy Olson, and Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski; Tei Blow, sound and video; Gordon Landenberger, set; Christine Shallenberg, lighting; Kaye Voyce, costumes; and Dan O'Neil, dramaturgy.

Characters

• MANAGER'S SPECIAL

• JAMES GLEICK, played by ANDREW and once by KENNIS

• KENNIS

• NEAL

• JEREMY

• VICTORIA

• ANDREW

• STEVE AND DAVE: ASTRONAUTS

• FEIGENBAUM (FIG TREE), played by ANDREW

• PAUL FEYERABEND, played by NEAL

• PRICE CHECK

A dim, nearly finished structure stands on one side of the stage. It has one corner window, one doorway with no door, and two steps. It bulges toward the bottom and its surface is naked sheetrock with the marks of spackle and joint compound. Nearby, a square of white carpet with antique chairs in wicker, red painted wood, and skinny white iron with round yellow cushions. On the other side of the stage, a grand piano swathed in great sheets of cloudy, milky plastic. Room tones are mixed from internal and external space at will, becoming the bed of sound/noise from which all things come. House lights to half. A public service announcement by MANAGER'S SPECIAL, a polished production for your information, an über-voice that dwells above the mayhem somewhere, keeping you informed of all the great savings in a clean, sexy, energizing way. When voiced at the supermarket—its true home that is unseen but not unknown to us—music steps smoothly aside to make way for it.

Manager's Special:

Welcome, APAP Presenters. The fasten seatbelt sign is: on. Please refrain from any flash photography, or documentation of any kind. At your own risk. Also, please turn off all cell phones and approved messaging and messenger, electronic devices, until further notice. Per Captain's orders. Thank you. We hope to be your favored theatre event in this, the most golden week in all of your year.

Lights fade to black. ANDREW, JEREMY, KENNIS, NEAL, and VICTORIA enter in darkness and form a strict line. Lights up. They salute and admit the audience to the piece via EZ-Pass. ANDREW wears a grey headset device and here plays JAMES GLEICK.

Gleick:

Here's a little sample of some of my writing.

ALL take chairs, changing position very often. ANDREW circles very slowly. Noise bed of Gemini missions IV though VIII. Crosstalk and telephone clicks are kept in place, but major communication and mission-specific language and motifs are removed. The talking is far away, pinched. ANDREW circles, interrupts by running through the shifting white carpet idyll. Watch out: they must grab their chairs out of the way, just in time. Again, MANAGER'S SPECIAL, dripping with tasty corporate non-feeling, broadcasting from here to here.

Manager's Special:

How many times and for how long, do you sit during a given day? When do you lie down? At what hour and in what context? Under what pretext do you lay? What is the pretext, which labors over you as you lie prone, there on the coverlet?

Buzzing. Buzzing of instruments, of sensors, somehow very deep and foreboding. Then: very tense and quiet violins from Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony. KENNIS, then JEREMY, VICTORIA, and NEAL, form a partly seated diagonal on the floor. A cloud passes overhead. There is birdsong and active chirping with occasional gunshots in the near distance. ANDREW stays in the chairs. NEAL's feet become cat feet. KENNIS steps improbably through JEREMY. He follows her foot with the Hyperion's curls on his head. Helicopter. Another cloud passes overhead. The sun is very bright. The first video setting emerges, slowly, upon the back wall of the...