Introduction

Before we start, I need to tell you the rules for this performance. This is my piece, but I don’t want it to be a flat, typical, I’m the actor and you’re the audience experience. I, instead, want to give you something fresh, something different, something not quite poetic and not quite theatrical. I could give you a lot of justifications for this—I’m taking down the fourth wall, I’m a pretentious English major trying to change the entire course of both literature and theater with one thesis, or we could scare the shit out of the traditionalists and just call it performance art. Whatever you feel most comfortable calling it is fine; it is what you experience. The basis for this is that life is theater, theater is life: someone’s always watching you, you’re always performing for someone else.

Suspend your disbelief. So we’re just talking here like we’re best friends and you stopped over unexpectedly and it’s a quiet night and I just poured you a killer cup of tea, whatever your favorite flavor is. Which isn’t really true since someone wrote this for me to say and I’m not going to give you any room to respond, and there are no refreshments, but that’ll be the tone. Confessional. Confident. Real. It’ll feel like I’m thinking this up on the spot, but it’s really rehearsed. All in all, it’s about blending the genuine and the artificially crafted, but that’s almost always what life feels like to me anyway.