foreword

Brightness Falls:Three Movements / A Note to the Composer

A good number of musical influences shaped the writing of this piece. One of them was the idea of the oratorio—like what Handel did with the Messiah. He was dealing with past and future glory, Brightness… deals with past and present falls— from grace. While Handel was intrigued by the weight and beauty of the scripture, I am a little more interested in the messengers—angels and their ...

Intimate Relay: NOTES ABOUT CHARACTERS, THEMES & SETTING

In various West African traditions, biological twins have a sacred/profane mystique. In Yorubaland in particular, they are considered magical and given special names, possessing a specific social function akin to the ‘alchemical union of opposites’ in Western Hermetic traditions… these varying facets of twinship are themes explored in this play. The piece also culls from A more sinister ...

Themes and settings for Christabel

Strongly influenced by the German Romanticists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began Christabel with the intention of creating a Christian morality piece. He failed. The first part of this poem is a feverish gothic vampire narrative with heavy lesbian overtones, so powerful that the ‘good over evil’ to come, never got written. It was too problematic for the poet to finish. Using the existing ...

A Few Words About Grimm’s Weimar Republic…

This body of work grew out of a commission by a Brooklyn-based theater company, White Bird Productions. Five different playwrights were asked to adapt one Grimm’s fairytale each—to modern day Brooklyn—to be presented as an evening of family theater. I stumbled a bit before hitting the appropriate note: like many, I am a fairy tale aficionado, but my attraction is to the darker themes. I came ...