It's Always Been About the Hair

The actress Jean E. Taylor came into my friend Aliza's Greenpoint living room last night (that's Greenpoint in Brooklyn, not Greenpoint in Cape Town) and turned it into an alternate universe. The Wild Hair Living Room Tour is an example of "basement art making," she says. "Exploring how possibility may emerge from a gloomy sense of nothing, we discovered scrap cardboard and string to be handy tools for constructing the world of our piece."
With a roll of tape, a doctor's coat, a chalkboard, and the aforementioned string and cardboard, Taylor (Ophelia disguised as a museum docent) began her highly entertaining "lecture" about the Wild Hare as part of the so-called Museum of Natural History's Outreach Program. This soon morphed into a tale of Wild Hair (read: non-conformists) and Dark Castles...a fairy tale about a thwarted love affair between a prince and a maiden, a dark place filled with immoral people and a young woman who needs to find the courage to step into the unknown. Of course this was all a metaphor for much deeper stuff.
Taylor is an energetic and talented performer and there is something about theater inside a living room that takes away the sometimes unbearable intimacy that I usually feel in a much larger theater. Or perhaps because it's in the living room there is no need to feel that intimacy as something "other".
At the end of the performance, there was a video made where the audience was asked to share an experience of being a "Wild Hair". Of course I had to get involved...told my story of leaving Elle (Dark Castle) when most thought I had a dream job. No regrets there.
For more info: http://wildhairlivingroomtour.com/index.php