not knowing

Author: Mike Taylor

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2014)

Third in the Emergency Playscripts series, not knowing sets out to deduce how history is made, how therapy rewrites personal history, the role of jokes in collective memory and the vast unacknowledged reams of material The Wild One and “The Wild Duck” have in common. Vaudeville Ibsen, Marlon Brando stuck in an attic in Norway, a psychiatrist who can’t decide between healing and fetishizing his patient, and live video footage that clearly supports whatever reality is currently in session. If you can’t fix it feature it. Starts on page 44.

"This play—not knowing (one powerfully remembers what one does not know?)—tracking the mind, which plays tricks on itself—but where is such depth located? On the surface of the INSIDE-LANGUAGE of course, which only THINKS it’s leaving the page (the stage) for where there is no life, but allusions to what is remembered, collected, and mixed to great effect."

–Richard Foreman

"Delicious... so confident and sure end to end. It treads the three cornered line between diversion and despair and that rarely sighted—on the stage— entertainment. Geez, it made me happy."

–Terry O'Reilly