Unwicked

UPDATE: Tonight marked my third visit to TMLMTBGB. There were a number of new plays tonight, and a new member (Kevin R. Free) made his debut. This may sound hokey as heck but I believe in the NY Neo-Futurists. I dig their aesthetic, I love their energy and intensity, and I respect greatly their artistry.

I never much went in for theater until Siri took me to see the SITI Company. They came to LA and performed at the Freud at UCLA. This was early in our dating life and so far Siri had not taken me to anything horrible. That night was the best theater experience I had enjoyed since seeing Pat Carroll do her one-woman Gertrude Stein show at the Westwood Playhouse. Well, admittedly “Little Shop of Horror” played there for a while and that was a hoot, but it was standard-issue entertainment. The SITI Company exploded my preconceptions of what theater was and would always be. Thank goodness for that.

At some point I will elaborate on Siri, but for now I’ll bring up one significant icon related to her: the Orange Gerbera Daisy. Sometimes we see signals and symbols that carry only the meaning we invest in them. Her birthday was July 4. The first year without her I prayed to her when I watched fireworks on the Fourth. It had been just over two months since she’d died, and I was deep in my pain. I think I believed she might actually come back, no longer ill, or I just needed her back, because I knew down to the cellular level that without her I was going to screw up the rest of my life.

Cut to the point. Tonight I was drinking a small black coffee while I was standing at the northwest corner of 2nd Avenue and E. 4th Street. It was a few minutes before they started letting people in at the Kraine to see TMLMTBGB and I noticed one of the Neos outside the bodega on the corner. It was Neo-Futurist Erica Livingston, and she held by the stem a single Gerbera daisy, orange perhaps. She was talking with someone and I went back to my coffee. The coffee was good, and the coffee was working.

That’s all. If this was two years ago, I would have seen that daisy as a sign or a message. Call it magical thinking or grief or the workings of a delusional mind. Tonight, I saw it as a daisy.

Gerbera daisies are the fakest looking flower. There is something artificial in their too thick stems and perfectly exaggerated petals; there’s no way they can be real. Yet, they are real. I could go into a little spin cycle about artifice and beauty and truth but all I want to say is that I don’t cry when I watch fireworks any more. I rarely pray. I’m not sure it does anything, even though I do believe that putting good thoughts out there helps. Yes, that’s contradictory. I didn’t pray Wednesday night when I watched the fireworks bursting behind the Brooklyn Bridge, but I said hello to Siri. I talked to her for a minute, something I haven’t done in at least two years. Talking to her felt good.

I had promised to get to the point. I think I am finally finishing the grieving process. I can’t point to one specific incident that helped get me back on track. I had postponed too much and it backed up on me like a clogged sink. And you don’t want to know what was stuck inside my trap. Watching the Neos do their thing has helped pry open the door I had slammed shut on my soul. Seriously. I’m feeding my soul and its appetite is growing. Now that I have rambled enough here, I am going to go to sleep.

This is from a piece that Siri created with her friend and artist Randy Hussong. It was a tribute to her friend Jimmy who had died.

What follows is my original post about the Neo-Futurists from June 24, 2007:

Welcome to the New York Neo-Futurists!

It started out a couple of weeks ago with an invitation from a stranger to go check out a show at the Kraine Theater in the East Village. The stranger was Claudia Alick, a member of the New York Neo-Futurists. The show is called “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind” and while I have no idea what it refers to (if anything), I love the way it sounds.

“Neo-Futurists” was another matter. Not another pseudo-intellectual band of radical theatre artistes, please. How wrong was I! I went back to the Kraine last night, two friends in tow, and I am hooked. The show changes enough over the course of just two weeks to suggest I should just plan on stopping in once a fortnight. The Neo-Futurists have the audacity to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. It’s not a stunt; it’s a revelation. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll have watermelon (if you’re lucky), and you might just go home a happy person.

If you are one of the three people who read this blog, go see the damn show. You won’t have me to thank. Thank the Neo-Futurists.

From the website:

The New York Neo-Futurists: Neo-Futurism
The Neo-Futurists are a collective of wildly productive writer/director/performers who create:

* Theater that is fusion of sport, poetry, and living-newspaper.
* Non-illusory, interactive performance that conveys our experiences and ideas as directly and honestly as possible.
* Immediate, unreproducable events at headslappingly affordable prices.
* We embrace those unreached or unmoved by conventional theater-inspiring them to thought, feeling, and action.