The Weaver and the Dress

Jubilith Moore directed my play, The Weaver and the Dress, at Willamette University in Oregon.   We’re calling it a play but it’s a little bit closer to some other form we haven’t yet named. And these students can do it — wonderful actors and dancers and singers. They have a great theatre program here. They performed the noh play, Hagoromo (The Feathered Mantle), paired with the Weaver. I started working on this piece as a five voice poem while the Artist-in-Residence at Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco.  In 2011, we showed the work-in-progress at NOHspace. Since then, I revised the overall structure and put in more narrative frames and dialog.  The play is inspired in part by Lady Rokujo in Tale of Genji and the dress used to represent Lady Aoi in the noh version of that story.  It’s one of a five play sequence that I am writing that looks at the art and love relationships left unresolved in the lives of artists Frida Kahlo, Emily Carr, Eva Hess and writers Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein. Moore did a fantastic job bringing it to the stage.