Plays
Black Snow Flying Upwards
About the Play
Black Snow Flying Upwards, or: My Embarrassment is a twenty-minute solo performance I created in late 2007 and early 2008 while suffering from a horrendous flu. I had “essayed” the character and some of the material at the November, 2007 “No Shame Theatre” at NCStage in Asheville. I’m told a video of this performance is accessible online. What eventually premiered at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival at the end of January, 2008 was to a large extent improvised—at least as far as the movement was concerned. I had simply felt too weak to do much in the way of choreography. The text was created by combining and adapting pirated material from my novella, The Wedding, and from my collection of prose miniatures, The Intimate Journals of Jacob Higginbotham. In the publicity for the festival, I described the piece as “a jittery vaudeville solo about a monotonous crucifixion. It’s also about love, death, hunger, memory, nausea, the mind, and the fragment of a leaf in someone’s hair.” That’s about right.