Grief lives next door.
This past weekend I directed an amazing performance by with caregivers of severely wounded warriors from WWP’s Independence Program. I crafted the script from their words, written in four weeks of virtual writing workshops and prompts. It was one of the more challenging collaborative performance projects I’ve undertaken this way (and I think by now I’ve done dozens), because after spending time with the writing they sent, I had the sense that instead of a poem that wanders, the performance should have a very clear narrative structure. I should say–I had two weeks from receiving their words to writing the script. They had 24 hours from seeing the script to performing it on stage. During these past two weeks, it was always in the back of my mind. I printed out their writing and carried the thick stack of pages with me everywhere. I put big paper up on my office wall and mapped out the arc. And then it rushed up, rushed past. And then afterward, on Sunday morning, I woke up and it was over.
