Staged Reading: Dying City

Friday, March 27, 2015
By Christopher Shinn
Directed by Christopher Brown
Location:Scullery at 7:30 PM
150 Las Vegas Blvd, Suite 190
Doors Open for seating at 6:30, but please join us at Scullery’s bar prior to the performance for small bites and drinks. Seating capacity is limited to 65, so be sure to arrive early.
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Director’s Note (from the program)

A play about the Iraq war… bleh. I had the same feeling when I chose it.  Regardless of the permutations into deeper, more complicated excursions into the same global area, for more ever opaque and insidious layers of “our” involvement in “The Region”… it’s very tired, despite the diligence. It was the title that first got me. Dying City. Christopher Shinn points to it late in the script, “the city is dying, and we are the ones who are killing it;” meaning, myopically in the play, the soldiers in Bagdad through the voice of his character, Craig, struggling with mental, metaphysical, and ultimately unharnessed physical and sexual violence. This sentence from his letters to his twin brother, Peter, is rendered hollow because of the persistent battering of modern media at the very same point which we are all so familiar with… so, back to square one, always, what is this play? I’m not a big fan of the DSM craze of our time… the diagnosis of the mind, as a playground for aberrant disease. That we live in an era where we are so achieved, yet, put time to sentencing the mind. That we somehow believe we have built a society so advanced that we are capable of quantifying each other through mental disease or “lack” thereof. Is this a really sound way to go through life together, searching out the balanced mind? Believing that we can find closure with personal tragedies, or, even, with global tragedies?  Events just, simply, happen. We react… that’s all. We walk through a forest, and we push branches away from our faces and discover the path in front of us, sometimes pleasant, magnificent… sometimes obscured, obsidian… always unexpected… always patterned by the naïve will we enforce to step forward. I can’t tell you what this play is about. I don’t want to tell you what this play is about. I can say that I’ve said much of what all three of these characters say in the play to each other to someone in my life at some time… sometimes the words have been covered by huge world events and sometimes they’ve just been personal with great momentary clarity. Sometimes they were spoken out of a selfishness that I didn’t know I had.  Take meaning when you can get it, and let it go in service to greater meaning… but don’t let it define you, ever.

– Christopher Brown, March 2015