Sherry Chandler

From Charles Bernstein, “Professing Stein” in A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

Not something to be translated away but something to enter into, to inhabit without losing the wildness, the ineffable largesse and poetry, of hearing without mastering or commanding. Unmastering language is not a position of inadequacy; on the contrary, mastery requires repression and is the mark of an almost unrecoverable lack. To be immersed in a language without the obsession to dominate it, conquer, take personal (even “subjective”) possession of it, as if it were property: perhaps this is virtualizing space of the modernist composition.

…

For truly it is hard for any one of us to know just what we are meaning by what we are saying. I mean it’s hard since all we have is our dialects, our ways with words and the rhythms of our saying: sometimes when we think we don’t know what we mean we find out what we do mean, language is like that. The meaning is saying.

This is the difference between blues and despair.

Meredith Sue Willis writes to announce the world opening of Unrestricted Acts: Violence and Vaudeville at the Kraine Theater in New York City. The presentation features two one-act plays: America Perseveres by Kentucky playwright Eagle Valiant Brosi and Breaking Ranks by New York playwright Zack Calhoon.

Brosi’s play supplies the vaudeville:

This vaudevillian comedy travels back in time with George and Martha before she was Mrs. Washington. See George slay “the Dragon” to woo his lady love and watch how the seed of destruction is planted despite the warnings of wise Pontiac.

From Zack Calhoon’s webiste:

This production is the culminating step in the first New Mummer Group (NMG) Writers Exchange. In the spring of 2007, three plays were submitted by company members and three plays were chosen from submissions by Kentucky writers. In July, NMG, sponsored by the Appalachian Center at Berea College, held the five-day Writers Exchange in Berea, KY. Kentucky and New York writers spent three days workshopping their plays with NMG actors. On July 10th, staged readings of the six one-acts were presented for a Berea audience. In September, the same six plays were read for a New York audience at Manhattan Theatre Club. Based on audience survey response and company discussion, two plays were selected for full production in New York - one by a New York writer and one by a Kentucky writer. This production is the culmination of a nine-month process that has crossed cultural and geographical borders in the interest of artistic cross-pollination and better understanding.

The plays will run November 1 - 18. For specific information, see the New Mummer’s website. More information about the Writers’ Exchange at this link.