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NIGHT SCALES: A FABLE FOR KLARA K Chris Tysh 74 pages, paperback Cover art by Christian Boltanski, photograph by Robert Keziere, design by Hazel Blake ISBN: 0-935992-40-5 Copyright © 2010 $14.00 "In Tysh's tough, visceral, lacerating text, we bear witness to a surreal poetry for the stage, reminiscent of Buchner, Artaud and Genet. Night Scales is a compassionate, devastating tale of death and survival by those who '...ate the bruises and drank the hurt in a long swallow.'" Charles Borkhuis "Why turn memory into theater? With Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K, Chris Tysh threads devastating testimony and playful humor through the question of how we enact, with bodies, as performance, memory's language. Does memory become gesture, dialogue, set design? Is it spoken alone or in the whole community? Using theater as an overarching challenge, how does memory become both song and costume, narrator and chorus, horrors and stage business equally? Developing voices we recognize and grow attached to, Night Scales moves us through events of the Holocaust seen in the hot and the cold, mundane songs and fragments of Russian, French and English. But how do we see horrors in language without staging them in real terms, even in our minds? The very best theater works both as play script and as mental mise-en-sc ne, concretizing the nominal world into bodies, actors, breathing. This is Tysh's fundamental 'rogue limit' as she writes it, on the road which is the melancholy passage of history, where personal stories become an affecting and unforgettable public display." Thalia Field Poet, playwright and translator, Chris Tysh was born and raised in Paris where she studied American literature at the Sorbonne. Since 1989, she has been on the faculty of the English Department at Wayne State University, where she teaches creative writing and women's studies. Her books include Secrets of Elegance, Porne, Coat of Arms, In the Name, Continuity Girl and Cleavage. Her Motor City drama, car men, a play in d, was staged at the Detroit Institute of Arts under the direction of Carla Harryman in 1996. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of Wayne State University through a Josephine Nevins Keal Fellowship for 2008-2009, and The Kresge Foundation for a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. Special thanks to Shell Hensleigh for the production photographs. UPDATED ORDERING INFO COMING SOON RETURN TO BOOK LIST |
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