Department
Theatre and Performance Studies
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 11-17-2023
Embargo Period
5-17-2025
Abstract
“In Yellow” was developed in the INKubator residency at Art House Productions (Jersey City, NJ) in 2019 with the following blurb:
In Yellow is a solo poem-play about a relationship between a young woman and a ceramic doll her grandmother made that she has just accidentally broken. It is about grief. It is about breaking out of generationally instilled feminine values. It is about the color yellow. It’s all true.
“In Yellow” is an experiment of a poem and play for one voice. I was in New York City for about 10 years, before that The Bay Area, but am originally from a small town in the South (southeast U.S.). My original work is deeply invested in the wrestle of being a queer woman from the South and dislocating from that space much of my adult life. It has been a wrestle to not buy into two-dimensional polarizing narratives, to wrangle with complexities and to be willing to be unsolved about some generational truths.
I wrote this piece quite lost in NYC. I was entrenched in utter amalgamations of personal, cultural, social, and political outrages and griefs. Geography became emotional: divides of city and country life unavoidable and proximate physical placement convincing. Beyond intersection, synthesis, or harmony, I sought collision, destruction, and breaking apart to create something new. Creatively, and of theoretical aim, the piece is an experiment of poem and play for one voice, though the literal doll is an onstage character – or at least an anthropological artifact in and of the performance. And while this poem-play is deeply personal, it wants to engage a societal dialogue of postmodern feminism, as well as anarchism. Importantly, it is about (the) performance (of) form.
Journal Title
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Journal ISSN
1748-5819
Volume
32
Issue
2
First Page
194
Last Page
230
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1080/0740770X.2023.2268365
Included in
Acting Commons, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Playwriting Commons, Poetry Commons, Women's Studies Commons