Meg Foster, Sissy Boyd and Wes Walker, on the motions and emotions between words<\/span><\/p>\n BY BILL RADEN<\/span><\/p>\n Meg Foster may be best known for her haunting, almost supernaturally unsettling, milky blue eyes, a quality that has made her a natural fit for horror, science fiction and thrillers in film work that spans three decades and includes Sam Peckinpah\u2019s <\/i>The Osterman Weekend (1983) and John Carpenter\u2019s Burroughsian alien-invasion classic, <\/i>They Live (1988), and, more recently, Rob Zombie\u2019s rock \u201cn\u2019 roll horror film, <\/i>The Lords of Salem (2013).<\/i><\/p>\n Here in Los Angeles, the actress may be best remembered for her stage work at the old LATC and for playing Regan in Norwegian director Stein Winge\u2019s darkly expressionistic <\/i>King Lear.<\/p>\n With <\/i>Riddance, the evening of hybrid performance art\/theater that opened on Friday at Highland Park\u2019s Moryork Gallery, Meg Foster returns to the stage, lured by the opportunity to work with its authors, the experimental playwright-performer Sissy Boyd and her frequent collaborator, playwright-director Wes Walker, who each contribute a one-act for the show \u2013 Boyd\u2019s <\/i>Movement For Two Voices, and Walker\u2019s <\/i>A Man Entire.<\/i><\/p>\n Stage Raw recently sat down with the three artists to talk about their collaboration.<\/i><\/p>\n Stage Raw<\/b>: Meg, you\u2019ve done stage work and, obviously, film. What qualities in Sissy\u2019s work do you find so inviting?<\/p>\n Meg Foster<\/b>: It\u2019s extraordinary. It\u2019s not like anything [else]. I\u2019ve been given a gift. It\u2019s very beautiful. . . and it\u2019s haunting. I read it when Wes sent it to me. I did not read it out loud. I did not read it to anybody. And then, I think when I met you both at Sissy\u2019s house, I just said, \u201cYou birthed this. This is life.\u201d And Sissy said, \u201cI did it one word at a time.\u201d So thank you. And that\u2019s what helps me remember.<\/p>\n Because to speak it \u2014 if one itty-bitty syllable is off, I might get two words away and go, \u201cWhere did it go? What did I miss?\u2019 It\u2019s a very different rhythm. It\u2019s not like learning lines, it\u2019s not like reciting a poem. Do you know? It\u2019s very different.<\/p>\n Wes Walker<\/b>: I was thinking of that. Like, what is it about this piece that\u2019s not a poem? That [makes it] theater \u2014 or is it? And part of it just has to do with the dynamic. It\u2019s the two people [Voice One and Voice Two], and it is about live speech \u2014 and witnessed live speech, through an audience joining and somehow finishing the relationship between the two. So to even further what Meg is saying, it\u2019s not just that a person learning their lines has to remember everything in order to kind of be able to remember it, it\u2019s that you also have to maintain a connection to the other person and then to the staged space that keeps it even more connected. It\u2019s a real tightrope act.<\/p>\n Sissy Boyd<\/b>: One thing for me was that first meeting, hearing Meg\u2019s voice, I had never heard something so [exactly] match what I had heard in my head. I can\u2019t even tell you how amazing that was. There were tears and this emotion and this silent sound echoing [in her reading]. I mean, I was just floored.<\/p>\n MF: Your words.<\/p>\n WW: I felt the same thing. That the first read-through of it, and then the second read-through of it, each one seemed to be almost immediately stage-worthy. Then it instantly struck me, the fear that, \u201cOh, I\u2019ve got to be careful not to fuck this up!\u201d That I\u2019ve just got to be on guard not to, like, get in the way of this in any way. Just only help it.<\/p>\n MF: I remember one day you said \u2014 you sent me an email \u2014 you said, \u201cWe will start the descent.\u201d Right? And I was, like, \u201cOookay.\u201d You know? But [the piece] reminds me of a labyrinth. Because you have these two voices. And you enter a labyrinth, and the idea is to in some way exit. But the experience depends on where you turn. You can turn this corner, you can go straight. How you turn is where you\u2019re going to go, and it changes the whole path. But you will never leave the labyrinth the same way you came in. And this is what this piece is about.<\/p>\n SR: Sissy, you were a dancer with Martha Graham. And you\u2019ve said that dance and movement are present in your writing. Is that movement in the language or in the blocking of Movement For Two Voices<\/i>?<\/p>\n WW: It\u2019s totally in both \u2014 one of the voices will be representing movement only through things spoken in the moment, and the other body will be responding to that through movement on the stage.<\/p>\n MF: And time.<\/p>\n WW: Yeah. And time. When we\u2019re talking about stillness and movement from stillness, so much of Sissy\u2019s work \u2014 and the whole raison d\u2019\u00eatre of her getting into writing at all \u2014 was that she went through this major episode of Guillan-Barr\u00e9 syndrome and was paralyzed for months. She had only expressed herself as a dancer \u2014 really completely defined herself that way.<\/p>\n SB: I wasn\u2019t interested in words at all. And then this kind of \u2026 I feel like it pushed me toward words. I didn\u2019t even know it was happening, but I had to figure out something to do.<\/p>\n MF: It\u2019s amazing when one is debilitated so profoundly \u2014 because you are a [dancer] and you did it as a child, and it became your life and your way to create \u2014 to go through that horror and not knowing. And what came from it was a gift. For me, the gift of your words.<\/p>\n SR: Can you describe the evening?<\/p>\n WW: My piece, which was always considered in tandem [with Sissy\u2019s], is almost like a reaction to hers in that hers kind of represents the quintessence of female strength. Again, I don\u2019t want to give too much away, but its mother-and-daughter thing and everything. And mine is a panicked reaction to that \u2014 what if that weren\u2019t there? What if that were missing? What if we fucked up our ecology to a point where that can\u2019t be there anymore?<\/p>\n SR: Wes, you started out in music, and just as dance and movement are present in Sissy\u2019s language, music and rhythm and sound seem key to yours.<\/p>\n WW: And it\u2019s kind of hard to talk about what that is, because it\u2019s just a sense, right? For Sissy, when you watch Sissy move around a stage, there\u2019s a sense \u2014 that you can\u2019t really describe \u2014 that she has when she moves her skirt around. And that\u2019s the same thing with the sound of a text or a play. You just know when it sounds wrong, and there are certain aspects to it \u2014 you kind of know what kind of sound an audience can hold onto.<\/p>\n SB: I always think of Wes as the pure poet. He\u2019s the purest. There\u2019s a purity, do you know what I mean? There\u2019s an intelligence that Wes has that the poetry is equal to. Some people have one or the other, Wes has both. It\u2019s phenomenal.<\/p>\n WW: The thing is \u2014 and I don\u2019t know how inviting it sounds \u2014 but both these pieces, they do ask something from the audiences. We do try to include them in the realization of what these things are. So it\u2019s hopefully not obscure to them, but there is an amount of help they can give us in completing the whole thing, right? And I think both pieces are honest about that. Because the way we approach these things are kind of open, and they allow for some unknowns, we ask that the audience joins us in resolving them as performance.<\/p>\n SR: You can\u2019t attend passively.<\/p>\n WW: Like I\u2019ve said to Sissy over and over, is that her work rewards attention; the more you give it, the more it will give you. But you have to pay attention \u2014 you have to listen in a way, which isn\u2019t always easy. We try to stage it in a way that allows that and doesn\u2019t distract too much.<\/p>\n Part of what I\u2019m trying to do is be aware of what this gallery is, this wonderful [Joseph} Cornell box of a space. And so we\u2019re trying to, you know, deal with that and kind of live next to that \u2014 these anachronistic things that are beautiful together and very chosen.<\/p>\n Riddance runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2p.m., March 21 through April 6. Tickets to all performances are $15. MorYork Gallery is located at 4959 York Blvd. in Los Angeles, California 90042. There is ample street parking. For reservations and information, call (323) 660-8998<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BY BILL RADEN<\/p>\n Meg Foster may be best known for her haunting, almost supernaturally unsettling, milky blue eyes, a quality that has made her a natural fit for horror, science fiction and thrillers in film work that spans three decades and includes Sam Peckinpah\u2019s The Osterman Weekend (1983) and John Carpenter\u2019s Burroughsian alien-invasion classic, They Live (1988), and, more recently, Rob Zombie\u2019s rock \u201cn\u2019 roll horror film, The Lords of Salem (2013).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3066,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_custom_body_class":"","_custom_post_class":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-column","entry","has-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3022"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3109,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022\/revisions\/3109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}