 I'm sitting where I can see you, John Flax. Really good. So, a moment of yes. We're going to drop you in the middle of the show, so I want to give you a little context before we end. Okay. Is that all right, John? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to get a book just in case we know what's going on. I thought we were supposed to talk to you during this show. No, no, no. Oh, okay. That was last time. Yeah. Yeah. That was last time. Thank you. Great. So, this show began a couple of years ago, and it started with a core of Grotesco members getting together once a month to talk about what they were most interested in during that month. And the recurring theme that just kind of kept coming around and around was communication. That's kind of broad. But I'll give you just one of the stories so you know kind of you can start to zero it in. One of the members' mothers who's in her 80s was teaching English as a second language. And she had a student who was a young Chinese woman who spoke not a word of English. And one day they were in the middle of a lesson. It probably was kind of difficult. And a Chinese woman left and went to the bathroom. And Elizabeth's mother decided she needed to stretch a little bit when she was 20 years old. And so she was doing a little yoga on the floor. Her student came back and saw her. And didn't quite know what to do, but assumed that this was part of the lesson. So she just joined her on the floor and they did yoga together. And of course then there was a moment when Elizabeth's mother saw her student doing yoga. And those moments are beautiful moments. So it's communication and it's miscommunication and where it goes. They became great friends and they hang out together and they still don't speak a word. But so as theater people we started to kind of deconstruct communication. What is it? And there's the communication that's verbal. There's the communication that's non-verbal. There's internal monologues and internal dialogues and my internal monologue talking to Kent's internal monologue. And it's just right for all kinds of lovely confusion. So how do we build a show with that? I don't know. So my name is Kent Kirkpatrick. I've been a member in the grotesque company for quite a while and I co-directed and helped create this show with John. So what we did then, after the core company kind of came up with these concepts, we cast two actors from Santa Fe and we were collaborating with Ben DeLion Company from Oakland and so Eric Cooper's and an actor of his came to join us. And we began with telling stories because that seemed to be like a way that we communicate. So the actors told personal stories that we looked at and then after a while we decided how can we make these more universal. So we couched each of their personal stories in either a myth or some sort of archetypical story or a biblical story. So all the stories come from a very personal place but they've been adjusted slightly in order to make them more universal. And then we kind of started thinking about Peter Brook and the empty space and sacred spaces and all that. So the concept then became an empty theater with just actors in it and nothing. So everything became very important. The people themselves, they're playing themselves, I'm going to sort of give them character, but they're mostly playing themselves. The props that we ended up selecting, the actual space itself, we did this in a proscenium in Santa Fe back in May and so it adjusts very easily to this kind of space. As we started these stories, the actors in Santa Fe and we were working in two different places. So the actors would add gesture to their story, gestures which were meaningful and could help tell the story so the story could be told either through movement or through text and sometimes joined together. Then we did videotapes of those and we sent them to Eric and Ben DeLion in Oakland. And they took those gestures, that narrative storytelling and created choreography with that. We did all this in January and March we went to Oakland and we worked with their company and his dancers thought our actors, our dances that they had created and so it was headed back to us from dancer point of view back to actor point of view. And then the actors took it and made this a completely new step with it because it became much more narrative for lack of a better word. Eric's company also brought songs and just pure dances and then we all came together and then we had to sit down and come up with some kind of structure with everything we had. So we had a beginning and a middle and an end. Our beginning we called discovery. The middle we called creating common culture and the end was society. So the arc of the play is that. You're going to see most of the middle sections tonight. And actually the stories also started from a very young age and they grew into old age. So it's another element that we could add. So what you're not going to see, you're not going to see the whole discovery part. You're not going to see the creation of language. You're going to see right after the very first story and we were playing with the idea of proposition. So we found this wonderful Brazilian writer, Clarice Lipspect, maybe some of you have heard of her. She's been called the James Joyce of Brazil and she wrote very difficult things but she had this beautiful quote and she said that the universe began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and the world began. So this is really about propositions. So when the first story comes about it's about remember when we were young and the others were young but they grew up in different places but it's a proposition and they say yes. And so they start to build a common culture through these shared stories because now we share it. And it's kind of like what we do in whatever culture we live in. We didn't create the stories but there they are, they're ours. So you're not going to see the end when a song and a story are euphoric and it leads them to creating a game and that's society. So once you have a game you have rules and rules to be broken and misunderstanding and cheating and it all breaks down of course but there's always the hope that we're still going to go on. There'll be another game tomorrow. So we're going to drop you right into the end of the first story where Keith is remembering when he was very young and his gang broke out of the backyard and they discovered this great new universe and then they got caught and he realizes in the telling of the story that that was probably why he was punished and sent to live with his father. Our actors, Eric Hoopers, Ian Penny, Tara Kozane and Daniel Redick. Okay, sneakers and a blow pop lollipops and a navelayers. Beth, Meeno Shelly, leader of the right for us and we can tell half a block away that she was mad and we were scared because remember her cousin Teddy and he did sepsis on her white converse? Anyway, Shelly, it looks like something that moms may believe would weigh up. The time that you all picked me up from school we were driving in your car but we were all there we were driving home on the 10 freeway heading towards downtown and we were in the fast lane and all of a sudden the car completely died, remember? And it kind of came to a stop slowly and the other cars were stopping behind us and going around and then there was that guy who stopped and knocked on the window and offered to take us across to the call box and I was going to stay with the car and you guys were going to go but then at the last second I went with you and he drove us across to the call box and I think you were calling and we were just sort of watching the traffic just come by and way in the distance there was that truck and it seemed like it was going really fast and it seemed like it wasn't slowing down and we looked at each other and we looked at it and it was like slow motion it just came barreling through the whole back of the car was in the front seat that's exactly where I would have been sitting I couldn't We were all there It's our story Yeah but I would have died Yeah you could have died Music but just please if we just sit down and do that again This is a brilliant play Yes but it is That's what these people are here for These people wanted morality They would have gone to some sort of church conference Well we could just ask them No we can't ask them Morality but ethics Proposition So we go to the strange little gas station and we fill up the car and with our last three dollars we walk into the convenience store the cigarettes in WT-40 and up in the distance and it's just like Denny's has these pristine picture windows and they're pouring scrambled egg colored light onto the sidewalk and we're just like we're gonna get ourselves some of those Santa Fe grill skillets some of that maple flavored bacon and that cold concrete totally pretty soon we're all chucking pieces of rock against that glass saying things like I'll show you 24 hours take that corporate America So we just pile into the go to sleep There's a big groaning sound coming from outside So we get out of the car comes over the horizon we realize that there is this huge crack spreading from one side of that picture window all over the other and it reaches the corner 24 hour diner coming soon We went into and it was round and we stood against the wall and the room of that bitch that we all sat in and they spun that around covered in mirrors everywhere the ceiling the floor every corner of this room was covered in mirrors that made you look I can tell y'all this but that night I had a dream that you all locked me in that room because you said that I was weird, big like a man of all or a motion so you made me look in the mirrors and I did I was in another people I think way more yeah probably more probably more like 100,000 I don't know it's really hard to tell how many zeros are there but anyways we're at the end of this ocean of people from the distance we can see there's the Brandenburger tour and there's this electronic music thing happening and a lighting show so we decided that we want to find a way all the way to the front of the crowd there's like cakes and beer being transported back and forth there's crustals slogging through the air and that goes on for a little while and it's this little guy he's like and he doesn't touch me he doesn't even look at me he doesn't look at that other guy he just holds the space around me and moves me to the outskirts of the crowd and then