Psychiatrist: There are only five categorical archetypes in the world.
Patient: Aren’t there 12?
Psychiatrist: There are five. But there are hundreds of nuances that allow us to lose ourselves in the myth of individuality…. This happened to you
Patient: Yes. The summer I spent in Norway. Studying the 19th-century Impressionist painter Frits Thaulow. That was the summer that everything changed.
It made me happy.
Terry O'Reilly
Third in the Emergency Playscripts series, not knowing sets out to deduce how history is made, how therapy rewrites personal history, the role of jokes in collective memory and the vast unacknowledged reams of material The Wild One and “The Wild Duck” have in common. Vaudeville Ibsen, Marlon Brando stuck in an attic in Norway, a psychiatrist who can’t decide between healing and fetishizing his patient, and live video footage that clearly supports whatever reality is currently in session. If you can’t fix it feature it. Starts on page 44.
Mike Taylor‘s first theater job was running the lights for Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in Sheridan Square. Since then, she has been writing, directing and producing theater, art installations and video. She has co-curated hundreds of artists and short pieces for Little Theatre, a monthly showcase of in-progress and experimental work. Her plays include: not knowing, The Sadness of Others, If I Were You, PEGLEG! or The Treacherous Journey ‘Round the Horn and Jumpstrasse Sehnsucht. Her work has been shown at La Mama ETC, The Kitchen, The Ontological, PS122, Cuchifritos Gallery, Dixon Place, TONIC, and various raw spaces in NYC, and her videos have been showcased in in the US and Europe. She is currently working on a new play Road to Perdition, World Without End (probably a situation comedy.)
This play—not knowing (one powerfully remembers what one does not know?)—tracking the mind, which plays tricks on itself—but where is such depth located? On the surface of the INSIDE-LANGUAGE of course, which only THINKS it’s leaving the page (the stage) for where there is no life, but allusions to what is remembered, collected, and mixed to great effect.
Richard Foreman
Delicious... so confident and sure end to end. It treads the three cornered line between diversion and despair and that rarely sighted—on the stage— entertainment. Geez, it made me happy.
Terry O'Reilly (Playwright, Performer)
ISBN: 978-1-937027-02-5
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 112 pp, Publication Date: February 15 2014
Distribution: SPD
Series: Emergency Playscripts