CRAVE
by SARAH KANE
GENERIC THEATER COMPANY, WASHINGTON DC
Crave is a collage, a fantasia, a human mind fragmented by emotional pain; a series of dreams, interpretations, stories, tremors, suffocations, conversations, paranoia and epiphanies. Crave exists between the urge for order and the need for self-destruction. It has a freedom of language that Sarah Kane had not yet explored. It is a play of voices. It is a melodious soul, crying. It is a listening exercise. A piece deliberately experimenting with form, language and rhythm, our Crave was a blank canvas.
Think about a Jackson Pollock painting. In his “drip period” Pollock defied the conventional way of painting, his canvases were now on the ground. He added a new dimension to the art, literally, by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. Pollock’s work, to me, signifies a graceful mix of the uncontrollable and the controllable. Flinging, dripping, pouring, spattering, Pollock’s painting became a dance and he would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.
Crave is brutally beautiful. Our Crave was about the process of creation. From the distillation of a concrete human experience, how do we create our art? Where does the poetry and the art of our lives come from? What do we leave behind when this world is no longer our own? Our Crave painted the cruelties of the world and patched it together with the human capacity to love.
Crave is a poetic meditation on love, loss and desire. It is impossible to have one reading of this play and our production was nothing but our own approach, our own creation. Every performance created a new piece of living art. Sarah Kane’s poetry deserves nothing less.
The words painted the picture.
