a lunatic dialogue for one player

Gven Golly and I went to a play the other night. One of Gven's fellow-students at the Yoga Factory in Northeasterville is Christina Kirk, a theater professor at Fundamethodist College who created a one-woman show called "Conversations with Judith Malina." Maybe you know of Malina and The Living Theater, which she founded with Julian Beck in 1947. It was new to me. Excerpts follow:

"Why these conversations, now? because all theatre is political, because I am afraid...guilty...ashamed...grieving...lying, because I need to cross a precarious bridge, because we're all caught in the illusion, we're all tired of waiting, we're losing the space between, we all need a lollipop every four seconds; because it's all so boring...there isn't a lot of time left...there is screaming...there is lack of screaming...there are bags of flesh; because the oblique angle needs a voice, the obtuse and acute angles are right, and the shimmering paradox may not be enough."

That gives you a taste of what it was like. Small theater, intimate space, cognoscenti present. Challenging to understand with the critical, editorial left-brain. The conversation comes across as a monologue by Kirk in which she acts as the voice, "often fragmented, occasionally altered, sometimes whole," of Suiye Ayla, William Saroyan, Anodea Judith, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Garcia Lorca, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, the Chordettes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lao Tsu, and Rumi. Pretty wild crowd. I thought I heard William Blake's ghost, but I was wrong.

We ran into some friends and high-tailed it to the Old Mohawk for beer and appetizers to deconstruct Kirk's "Conversations" but didn't get far in that attempt. Professor Gorm knew the literary references but not the chakra theory, I knew the chakra theory but not the literary references, so we talked about basketball, more my speed.