[redacted] Theater Company

Juniper Street

Presented in two parts as part of the 2014 fringe/fringe Festival

Sponsored by GreenStreet Coffee Co.

An apartment at 50th and Baltimore Ave.

August 22nd, 23rd, 29th, 30th

Part One: The Wake 8:00pm - 9:30pm

Part Two: Alive 9:30pm - 11:00pm

Part Three: A Sleep 11:00pm-9:00am

Pay What You Can, $20 recommended

Limited Seating - email redacted@redactedtheater.org for tickets

Photo by Martin Froger-Silva

Juniper Street. You are chosen. You will live forever.

The following ghosts and others who remain nameless helped make Juniper Street possible. We are forever grateful to: Gabe Benjamin, Kevin Christopher, Omeed Firouzi, Hannah Hammel, Sungwon Ma, Anushka Mehta, Greg McLucas, Linda McLucas, Patrick Ross, Books Schwartz, Denise Sullivan, Mark Levine-Weinberg, and Joe The Stranger.

A Play/Feast/Sleepover/Party in three parts. “The Wake” is the story of a family’s multigenerational relationship with the Angels of Death: A mother’s shortsighted deals with Mephistopholes, a daughter’s punk rock love affair with Suicide, and an old father’s fight to leave something of himself behind before he vanishes. Following “The Wake”, the audience is served a three-course meal by the performers, a celebration of birth, marriage, and a life joyously lived. This feast-play, called “Alive,” evolves to become the third section, “A Sleep”. Those audience members who choose to stay can stay awake, fueled by show sponsor GreenStreet Coffee, and participate in the world of the family’s story, in ritual remembrances of the dead and in teenage truth or dare games. When and if they do fall asleep, the play continues into their dreams, with subtle musical influences. Audiences are free to leave after “The Wake,” which is a fully realized play on its own.

Enter our home.

My apartment contains objects strewn bedwards, wide windows to admit the sun,
A kitchenette old as your parents, pens paintbrushes stacked in disorder around the edge of a wide rickety desk,
Grimed carpeting burnt by cigarrettes, engravings on the walls, crosshatched sketches of impossible architecture
Next to a double bed with tangled sheets flush up against the openglassed balcony door cheap swedish bookshelves aslant

A fifth of maker’s mark rarely tasted against the tile floor of the bathroom,
Three mismatched microbrews from defunct breweries stirring restless in the fridge while above in the bonsai freezer
A portion of vodka in a dasani bottle rests for the weekend and distribution in thimblefuls into orange juice before midnight frisbee (the key to alcoholism, a friend once said, is moderation)

Three packs of camels sequestered in obscure locations as follows:
A. In the right cupboard next to the pancake mix with “emergency, only in the worst of circumstances” redinked along the top,
B. Tangled irreperably in the sheets like a chinese puzzle box to be teased out only during sleep or lovemaking as a welcome surprise in conjuntion with the Bic beside the bed
C. Shelved improbably between a french cookbook and Lapham’s quarterly while White lines of ramen in white bowls steam uplifted to red tongues around
A patio table covered in starched white linen while outside

There is the rythm of running feet, clasping hands a thumb along the jaw bodies beneath the sheets families formed, meaning extracted like gold out of the stubborn rock imperishable uplifted in the shape of fire changing unfixed yet defined—

And as I grow older crowsfeet and dead friends
Will accumulate around the edges of my eyes,
Until I return to Los Angeles three years later
And the complex that held my apartment is gone.

But still I wake and take the sheets off my body and light a cigarrette turn on the music make my coffee hold my other close and we pause together arms crooked around sides struck by light at the window as the sun arcs over the horizon and the day begins.