THE SORRY. PILE - staged reading SITI Company NYC 2019 MY STORY: Early in life, my gift for truth surfaced as a nascent playwright. Thanks to Miss Mitchell, my fifth-grade teacher, I was allowed to write and perform plays in class, inventing characters who said and did things I was not allowed to express. Women being silenced has been a recurring theme in my work ever since.
Theater-making is my passion, revelation of the human condition is my goal. Driven equally by movement and text, each project is vetted against this Mission Statement:
When the exquisite world of the body wrestles with the complexity of the heart, we cannot look away.
Paradoxically, what I love most about live theater is the Audience’s freedom to look anywhere.
SORRY.'s GOAL: Ever count how many times you apologize in a day? Once or twice? Three times? Too many to count? How many apologies were authentic? Were any of them deflection? Strategy? A cover for how you truly feel?
Despite advancements, women continue to navigate unspoken hierarchies at home and in the workplace. Incidents may not be newsworthy or prosecutable, but the damage is felt. Sorry. illuminates the multiplicity of ways that women defer, adapt, comply, hide, cope, and apologize in what continues to be a man's world. Diving down the rabbit hole of the female apology, Sorry. examines the ease and frequency with which women apologize, and the shorthand/underlying code it has become. Sorry. offers the audacious and radical premise that the misuse of two simple words, “I’m sorry”, undermines a woman’s sense of self, her power, her place in the world.
Featuring three “women of a certain age” from different centuries and a chorus of Furies, Sorry. proposes a new world order where only a sincere apology can be uttered. Sorry. is funny, bold, ridiculous, shocking, and truthful. All of the men in Sorry. are played by one male actor. In a reversal of the commonplace gratuitous nudity expected of female performers, the men are costumed from the waist up and appear naked below. The men are an intentional device, highlighting the “benign,” everyday ways women continue to be subjugated.
Collaborator/Art Director/Contemporary artist David John Attyah, lives and works in Los Angeles. Our shared artistic sensibilities include: embodiment, symbolism, and movement. Much of Attyah’s artwork addresses gendered vulnerability, identity, and reconciliation.
THEMES: It’s (still) a Man’s World; Women Undermining Women; Aging and Beauty; Abortion; Breast Cancer and Beauty; The Female Apology.
