“Martha”: A play about extinction, de-extinction and love

  “Martha” (click on links for pdfs of plays) is a true story of extinction set in the woodlands, small towns and big cities of the Eastern half of North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 No one alive today has ever seen the natural wonder of almost mythical proportions that was the passenger pigeon. Once the most numerous bird in North America, passenger pigeons formed megaflocks so large enough they took hours or even days to fly over. Their numbers were so great that they could eclipse the sun, covering the sky from horizon to horizon.

After billions of the birds were slaughtered by men in the 19th century, the last passenger pigeon in the world died in a zoo in Cincinnati in 1914. Her name was Martha.

This play, told from the point of view of Martha, describes what happened to passenger pigeons before and after extinction. It shows how industrialized killing can reduce a wild population from billions to zero in a few decades. It examines current proposals for a bioengineered de-extinction of the passenger pigeon. And it asks what is it like to be the last one, the sole survivor after billions of your kind have been slaughtered.

“Martha” is a one-act play originally written as a radio play.

Starved: A play about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment

“Starved” (click on link for play pdf) asks how much a scientist can ask someone to suffer even if the result will potentially help millions. And how much can a person endure to stand up for one’s beliefs.

The play tells the true story of Ancel Keys, head of the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene, and what is now called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

Towards the end of WWII, while the Allies were grinding toward victory, Keys was given the task of trying to figure out the best way to feed starving people in newly liberated war-torn countries.

This play depicts Keys’ dramatic solution: an exhaustive study that would subject humans to “semi-starvation” in laboratory conditions to see how they would respond to recovery diets.

Conscientious objectors who were recruited as guinea pigs. They’re pacifists who refused to kill for their country, but who volunteered to sacrifice themselves to help others, even while they were regarded by the rest of the country as cowards and slackers.

Housed in a laboratory underneath the university’s football stadium, the young men are put on diets replicating famine conditions in Europe. They become emaciated to the point that they resemble concentration camp survivors. And they go a little crazy.

The test subjects become obsessed with food. They collect cookbooks and kitchen gadgets. They have nightmares about cannibalism. They develop bizarre eating rituals. They feel like old men, lose interest in sex and become depressed, lethargic and irritable. Two men end up in a mental institution. One man maims himself.

The end result is a landmark examination of the biology of human starvation, one that is still cited today. Because of ethical considerations, it’s also an experiment that could never be done today.

“Starved” was chosen for a March 2016 reading at the Workhouse Theatre Greenhouse Project, Minneapolis.

The St. Paul Snowblower Ballet

The beauty of falling snow has inspired artists ranging from poet Robert Frost to painter Pieter Bruegel.

But what about the aesthetic value in getting rid of the stuff?

Plowing, shoveling and blowing snow is a winter nuisance for those of us in the North.  I’m planning to create a new perspective on that chilly chore with a joyful, fun and uniquely Minnesotan public art performance that is a winner of a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant.

Imagine a snow-covered space on the banks of the Mississippi River with a view of the downtown St. Paul skyline. A live orchestra begins to play ballet music, punctuated by the sound of engines being started.

The dancers move onto the venue, pushing snowblowers in precise formations, pivoting and wheeling, describing symmetrical patterns in the snow, the white powder being thrown into the air in coordinated arcs. Shovelers join in by pitching the snow in time with the music.

Think of the geometric patterns of a Busby Berkeley or Esther Williams spectacle. Only a lot colder.

The St. Paul Snowblower Ballet will come to Harriet island in St. Paul on the Sunday before Super Sunday 2018 as part of the Winter Carnival.

A live local audience will watch the free performance, but we aim to attract a potential worldwide audience with an online video, which we plan to film from above with a drone.

The project will be produced in partnership with the St. Paul Ballet and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and thanks to a grant award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge, which funds ideas that engage and enrich St. Paul through the arts.

Skyscraper: An exhibit at the Smallest Museum in St. Paul

Why shouldn’t the largest objects created by human hands be exhibited at the Smallest Museum in St. Paul?

I curated this exhibit on skyscrapers and other buildings shrunk down to miniatures at a micro-museum created in 2015 in a former fire hose cabinet outside of the Work Horse Coffee Bar on University Avenue.

In this streetscape gallery I displayed mass-produced miniature buildings, crudely-rendered souvenirs, paperweights, tchotchkes made of cardstock, plastic, wood, pot metal or rubber eraser. Stripped of details, you are left with the broad brushstrokes or a rough silhouette of what a building looks like. Yet they are recognizable at a glance because they capture the essential impression that a great landmark leaves on the eye.

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True: A play

Forget about self-driving cars and jetpacks. When are  we going to get sex robots? That’s the starting idea for this 10-minute play, “True”.

“True” raises the question of what would happen to interpersonal relationships between humans if robots took care of our day to day sexual needs. And what would it mean for a machine if it had the intelligence, empathy and feelings to be a good sex partner?

“True” has been performed at the 2016 Asheville National 10-Minute Play Festival. It will be performed at the 2017 Actors’ Theatre 8 Tens @ Eight Festival, Santa Cruz, and it was short-listed for 2016 Pint-Sized Plays, U.K., and the Short+Sweet Sydney 2017 play festival, Australia.

Audition: A play

This 10-minute play began with the idea of checking something off from your bucket list. What if you had a literal deadline of 10 minutes to do that? What final thing could you do if you had 10 minutes to live?

“Audition” recently had its premier at the North Park Playwright Festival in San Diego.

137th Street: A play

“137th Street” is a 10-minute play I wrote that was inspired by a newspaper series I wrote about the nature of heroism.

Specifically, a very narrow, classic definition of heroism. I wrote about people who risked their lives to save the life of another. These are people, civilians from all walks of life, who were willing to run into a burning building or plunge into an icy lake or rush into the path of a train to save the life of a complete stranger.

This sort of extreme altruism does not make lot of evolutionary sense to biologists.  It’s a form of behavior that has led some psychologists to suggest that heroes and psychotics have something in common.

And it inspired me to write this play about a chance encounter on a subway platform.

Signers

I’ve always been  interested in handmade signs: signs that advertise garage sales, that are held up in marches and protests, that beseech people to look for a lost pet or that support a political campaign or a cause in a particularly personal way.

Then there are the signs used by people to ask for money at the side of the road. I know many of us feel awkward encountering these signs. It’s easy to look away from this activity called “signing” or “flying.”

Here’s what you can learn when you stop to talk to a signer:

How lawnmowers and gas grills fly: A siege engine is built in the suburbs

As a journalist and artist, I’m attracted to people who are not content to live ordinary lives, who have a vision or an obsession. Like these 13-year-0lds in the bodies of 40something men who built a trebuchet in Hugo.

Marshmallow Peeps Dioramas: The origin story

Thirteen years ago, as a feature writer with the St. Paul Pioneer Press trying to fill some space in the Easter Sunday paper, I suggested sponsoring a Marshmallow Peeps Diorama Contest.

Little did I know I was starting a cultural phenomena, an annual spring ritual in which grown-ups using hot glue guns and corn syrup chicks and bunnies as their medium would create increasingly sophisticated shoe box-sized sculptures inspired by everything from classic art to historical events to current day controversies. The idea has been adopted by newspapers and other publications nationwide, ranging from the Washington Post to the American Bar Association Journal.

Here’s a video I made that illustrates the idea: