the rapture,
a play by James Sherry & Mark Wallace
Presented by Inter Poets Theater
12/06/2020
Live on Zoom
This was the company's inaugural production.
Jesus has arrived on Earth. In Florida. Is it the Second Coming? Nobody is sure. But Jesus has his hands on a lot of opportunity! Many people want a piece of that action: CEOs, politicians, reporters, lobbyists and ministers, workers and students, the Russians. What follows is a chaotic struggle: the dead walk, and angels and armies are taking sides. Is this the Rapture that the prophets foretold? In this boldly contemporary version of a medieval Morality Play, the denizens of Earth, Heaven, and Hell fight to control the answer to a crucial question:
What does Jesus want?
Starring:
Roland Sands
Thomas Fink
Anna Kohler
Stephen Ira
Greer Sinclair
Clarinda MacLow
Directed by James Sherry
Produced by Lonely Christopher
Produced by Artists Space
Technical Direction by Izzy Dow
Technical Assistance and Voiceover by Anastasios Karnazes
Graphic Design by Venn Daniel
Cast & Crew Bios
Lonely Christopher is the author of five books, most recently the poetry collections The Resignation and In a January Would. His plays, including Voyages and Endymion Dreams the Moon, have been produced in Canada, China, and the United States. He is the founder of the Inter Poets Theater.
Izzy Dow is an event and performance producer based in Brooklyn, New York. She has coordinated hundreds of programs for cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum of American Art, Chicago History Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Izzy holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with concentrations in Visual Art, Art History, and K-12 Art Education. In her free time she runs an online vintage business, sews baskets, makes ceramics, takes photos, and teaches art.
Thomas Fink is the author of 11 books of poetry, most recently, in collaboration with Maya D. Mason, A Pageant for Every Addiction (Marsh Hawk Press, 2020) and Hedge Fund Certainly (Meritage Press and ie Press, 2019) and 2 books of criticism, and editor of 2 critical anthologies. His paintings hang in various collections.
Stephen Ira is a poet and performer. His poetry has appeared in venues like Fence, DIAGRAM, Poetry, and tagvverk. He has presented solo performance work and acted in plays at venues like La Mama and Dixon Place. “I Have To Think Of Us As Separate People,” a short film he made with Chris Berntsen, premiered at OutFest in 2019 and has since been screened worldwide. In 2013, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently a poetry editor at the speculative magazine Strange Horizons.
Anna Kohler, Music and Theater Arts faculty at MIT, studied acting and directing at the Conservatory for Art and Drama and Mozarteum University of Salzburg. She received her degree in Acting and Aesthetic Studies at the Université IIIV Vincennes in Paris after studying mime with Etienne Decroux. Since joining the NYC experimental theater scene in 1982, she has worked with Stuart Sherman, John Jesurun, Richard Foreman, Fiona Templeton and Werner Herzog. She is an associate member of the Wooster Group. She has worked with Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Jr. Her solo performance, D’ Arc- ness, premiered at Amsterdam’s Triple X Festival. More recently, she has toured Europe with Ode to the Man Who Kneels, written and directed by Richard Maxwell. She appeared in movies by Jonathan Demme, Peter Sellars and Hal Hartley. Her directing work has been shown in Salzburg; Kiel, Germany; Saõ Paulo; and NYC.
Clarinda Mac Low began performing with her father Jackson Mac Low and with Meredith Monk at the age of 5. In the late 1980s, Mac Low worked in dance and molecular biology and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory installations and events that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience. Mac Low is co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, an organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement. Her work has appeared at Panoply Performance Laboratory, the EFA Project Space, P.S. 122, the Kitchen, X-Initiative, and many other places and spaces around NYC and the world, including the Manifesta Biennial in Spain. Recent work and ongoing projects include: “Incredible Witness,” “Free the Orphans,” “The Year of Dance,” “Cyborg Nation,” and “Salvage/Salvation,” She received a BAX Award in 2004, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, 2007 and a 2010 Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant. Mac Low holds a BA, double major in Dance and Molecular Biology, from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice from CCNY-CUNY.
Roland Sands started his career in the street theater troupe The Soul & Latin Theater in 1969. He studied acting for many years with Clay Stevenson. He trained further at NY’s Public Theater acting as an understudy in Shakespeare’s Pericles. He worked on Broadway as understudy at the Negro Ensemble Company from 1974-76, performing the The First Freeze of Summer. For many years he worked in regional theater. He has also done extra work for film and television since the late 70s as well as principal roles in commercials for major corporations such as American Express. More recently he worked on soap operas such as One Life to Live and Loving as well as many low-budget films, most recently Baston.
James Sherry is the author of 13 books of poetry and theory and one of the leading proponents of both Language Writing and Environmental Poetics. His books include The Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s the Prince for Our Time (Palgrave, 2018), Entangled Bank (Chax, 2016), Oops! Environmental Poetics (BlazeVox, 2013), Four For (Meow, 1995), Our Nuclear Heritage (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), Lazy Sonnets (Potes and Poets Press, 1986), In Case (Sun & Moon Press, 1980), Part Songs (Awede Press, 1978). His work has been translated into nine languages including the Chinese edition of Selected Language Poems (Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1993), translated by Ziqing Zhang and Huang Yunte. He is the editor of Roof Magazine and Roof Books that has published nearly 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative and environmental poetry and poetics. He started the Segue Foundation in 1977 that has produced over 10,000 events in New York including the Segue Reading Series. Sherry was born in 1946 and lives in New York City.
Greer Sinclair was born on the studio backlots of Los Angeles and raised in the bayous of Louisiana, Greer studied filmmaking, performance, and literature at Mount Holyoke College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the San Francisco Art Institute (B.F.A). In 2017, Greer toured the U.S. with Noir City, a film festival presented by the Film Noir Foundation. As Miss Noir City, she co-hosted the festival with Eddie Muller of Turner Classic Movie's Noir Alley. Classic film is one of Greer's greatest passions and her love of noir influences much of her work. As a singer and performer, Greer was recently featured on a special "Watching the Hawks" segment of RT America, highlighting new and innovative musical artists. With frequent musical collaborator Joe Gore (Tom Waits, PJ Harvey), 2018 saw the release of two singles, SILVER DAGGER and I'D KILL TO BE HER MAN, produced at Outland Studios. Greer starred onstage as the title character in a new stage adaptation of Tennessee Williams' BABY DOLL through Summer 2018 at Pacific Resident Theatre in Los Angeles. Her performance garnered critical acclaim, and the production broke records with its extended sold-out run.
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a novel, Crab, and a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. Selections of his multi-part long poem The End of America, which he has been writing since 2005, have been published in several chapbooks and a number of journals. His current novel, Sir Sleepy of the Bunny Nest (A Saga of the Revolution), is an ongoing serial appearing on a fugitive tumblr blog. He lives in San Diego, California.
Author Acknowledgements
Thanks to Artists Space’s Jay Sanders, Miriam Katzeff and Stella Cilman; Robert Lyons of the New Ohio Theater for his advice and counsel, and Abigail Child for reading our play carefully.
Special thanks to the 2019 performance readers Lenora Champagne, Thomas Fink, Clarinda Mac Low, Uche Nduka, John Reed, and Fiona Templeton.