Setting the stage: DAISY

“The stage is partitioned into several areas, at times giving the sense of distinct, dedicated spaces; at other times lending the impression of worlds colliding and overlapping. It’s a multi-dimensional, tapestry-like warehousing of the tools, furnishings, memorabilia, egos and curiosities of the worlds of advertising and politics, as remembered and catalogued by a singularly neurotic mind. The machinery of electronic media is omni-present. In fact, there is space above all of this (literally) for thought and imagination to be rendered in splendid, vivid detail. At the centre of it all, although forever on the fringe, is the work studio of TONY SCHWARTZ: communications theorist, sound archivist, advertising man, inventor.”

As a playwright, I find beginnings to be the most challenging, and also the most inventive. It’s in describing the world for the first time that I find the frame gets built on which to hang the details of the world that’s being created. While it’s too easy to get into far too much detail, I hope to lay down in a few paragraphs a subtle sense of what I’m going for, to allow for the imagination of others to propel it further into realms I myself couldn’t discover, and to prevent my own aesthetic limitations from ascribing too much restriction.

After several years of research (and it’s been some of the most exciting research I’ve ever done) I’m finally ready to start actually writing, knowing full well that additional research is always one whim of curiosity (and one Google search) away.

As I’ve been observing the processes and products of some artists whose work I admire, I envy the span of time and opportunity they’ve had to create these pieces. In particular, I can think of two powerful artists whose singular vision must’ve yearned for the perfect laboratory environment where their artistic impulse could see the instantaneous result of taking actual form; testing their ideas in physical ways with the interplay of live beings, real footsteps, actual voices, electricity. Sometimes, as fertile as it might be, the imagination is too lonesome a place to keep all of one’s ideas contained.