Inside of room 603 in an unnamed hotel, a man dwells inside a parallel universe where he attempts to avoid his quickly approaching destruction caused by the murder of his wife. This fractured crime of love weaves George Bataille's "Madame Edwarda" with Barry Gifford's "Tricks". Both stories spiral around a woman who has been created by the dangerously obsessive desires of their male companion. The opposing forces of man and woman play out inside the landscape of deception, while all the characters attempt to hide within the confines of fantasy. "Tricks" winds around it's story with an evocative sparse dialogue and claustrophobic mood that places it in the tradition of film noir. "Tricks" contains within it a porthole transporting the performance into a vaudeville presentation of "Madame Edwarda", where on her ropes and swing the female character continually transforms herself inside The Mirrors, a seedy brothel where the male character hopes to find evidence of God in the grotesque. The stories, in their attempt to deceive, must contend with a soothsayer who takes the form of a ballroom singer. In the end, a knock on the door is the last evidence of an outside world.

Based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, The Devils centers on the historical circumstances that befell Father Urbain Grandier, an acting official of the fortified city of Loudon, France. By 1634 the city, infected with the plague, attempted to hold onto its sovereignty while maintaining the protection of its protestant populace; while a move towards a central government was being put forth in Paris. Should the walls come down around Loudon the Protestants would meet an unfortunate fate. Within the cloister of the provincial French Nunnery at Loudon, Sister Jeanne of the Angels has become demented with her love for Father Grandier. Although he gives his love to many, the hunched back Sister Jeanne is not among them; in retaliation she accuses the priest of witchcraft. Wishing to rid the town of Grandier and believing him to be responsible for the walls, Cardinal Richelieu takes advantage of the nun’s story to have the Priest brought up on charges of diabolism, hoping to finally purge Loudon’s protestant community once and for all.

Nowak’s piece employs quotations from Brecht and from labor movement icons as it dramatizes the plight of its fictional ‘heroine’. Francine’s deep identification with the labor she performs cannot be dislodged, even by her own grief.

Author Biography
Mark Nowak is author of Revenants, Shut Up Shut Down (with an afterword by Amiri Baraka), and co-editor (with Diane Glancy) of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours, all from Coffee House Press. He is the editor of the journal Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics (www.xcp.bfn.org), and founder of the Union of Radical Workers and Writers (www.urww.org). His verse play Capitalization (about Reagan's firing of striking PATCO workers) won a development grant from the Stage Left Theatre in Chicago, where it premiered in February 2004. His essay on gothic-industrial music and deindustrialization in America's rust belt is forthcoming in Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press).

Muriel Vanderbilt Goes Walking tells the story of a woman stolen away to her room and forced to listen to the sounds of her husband’s infidelities, which turn to shrieks of pain, as the house becomes a playground for the acting out of sexual and violent fantasies.  As Muriel’s beauty and sanity erode, the jealousy she originally felt begins to transform into an unnamable fear. She believes it to be the rain or unexpected guests that are moving about the hallways outside her locked bedroom.  Inside the room she begins to live in memories.  One of these memories becomes the story of The Juniper Tree, a tale of creation that may have given birth to Muriel’s present confinement.