Artist Statements

It is essential today to be honest about how we want to live our lives, dream our dreams, and accept the outsider in ourselves and within society. As more and more people are shut out from opportunity, the reality of life moves farther away from creativity, and thus the resultant rapid growth of desperation. Extreme desperation cancels the ability to invent, to think, to protest. Although at first glance the story of the Disappearance, in which a man appears to stage his own kidnapping, looks 'made up,' it is based on a true account in the Netherlands, similar to other more recent 'kidnapping' acts: the runaway bride, the Chicago lawyer's self-abduction, the professor who vandalized her car with Jewish slurs. All these stories, of kidnappings, torture, school shootings, and violence, point to a people who have lost the drive to transform reality, no longer believing their voice of protest is heard. Yet our reality is completely unacceptable, with baseless wars and utterly absurd economics. As desperation, betrayal, and pain resonate, we in Double Edge speak in the Disappearance to the depths of these emotional ambiguities and attempt to maneuver our way out of the maze of doubt that obscures art and introspection.

the Disappearance reflects a room of its own, or many distinct rooms, within which the boundaries of each artist's prior self concept are exploded. A dialogue of individuals begins , and through the limitless bounds of improvisation, a vision is created that sees the past as a means of speaking to the future.

I wrote the story "The Disappearance" in 2005. Based on a real-life incident that took place in the mid 1908s, it is about Marteen Soetendrop, a Belgian actor with a reputation for Shakespearean roles, whose Jewishness comes in the way of his confidence. When neo-Nazi groups in the Netherlands undergo a revival, Soetendrop, infuriated by the callous response in the country to the play, is kidnapped. Eventually it emerges that his disappearance is self-made. He is caught by the police and denounced publicly for his delusions. The embarrassment pushes the Netherlands to a debate on the role of Jews in society.

Late in 2006, Double Edge asked if I would be interested in collaborating with them in a theatrical adaptation in which I, as the author, would be actively involved. Working on stage in improvisational exercises, establishing a multifaceted dialogue with the director and the actors, allowed me to explore the interface where literature and drama meet. It pushed me to reconsider the very fibers that make fiction work on the page. For instance, in the Double Edge stage adaptation, Soetendrop, at the time of the kidnapping, is performing as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Shylock, the ultimate anti-Semitic stereotype, becomes, for me, Soetendrop's counter-image. Clearly, self-love and self-hatred are two sides of the same coin.

At a time when theater appears to be, for the most part, a complacent artistic form in the United States, what Double Edge does is courageous: it invites us to think the stage as a forum where to experiment with identity.