work in progress – first showing at 95 Empire May 10th and 11th.
We’re doing a performance about Simone Weil. Who is she? As soon as you put an adjective in front of Simone‘s name, you have to start adding hyphens. Simone was a French-Jewish-Catholic-
Philosopher-Mystic-Marxist, but she didn’t want any names, not even her own. Still, there’s a certain gravity to her work, both her writing and her biography, that keeps you reading, that holds onto you, and that’s what this play’s about. We joked that it’s “about” Simone the way the earth goes “about” the sun. The question was: how do you make a play about someone who wants to “become nothing, ” when theatre is so persistently something. That’s what makes it like life. So we began with five aspirations, let’s call them “theatrical aphorisms,” that yearned to evoke Simone Weil. Then they all started moving around.
dan j ruppel 