As part of the StageSource Indiegogo Campaign for our “Live from the Library” initiative we offered blog posts as a giving perk. The following is the first of those posts.
Ten years spent studying and practicing theater. Ten more years of studying and practicing psychology. Otherwise known as, Miss Conduct’s Career. And if I’ve learned any one thing it’s that ghosts are real. The Gothic, for all its mad excess, is the truest aesthetic out there. Because we’re all haunted by something. That thing your mother said that one night. That photo that could still be out there on the internet. Regrets. Debts.
“Blood Rose Rising” is a new idea in theater, based on a very old idea in storytelling: the serial narrative. Each episode of “Blood Rose Rising” can stand on its own—but each episode is also a chapter in the ongoing story of Robert Blackwood and his haunted legacy. What happens next? Come back and see.
Why would you become a ghost?
For revenge?
For love?
Or to see what happens next?
That’s why I’d come back, if I could. Curiosity. Wanting to see how the stories turn out. Once I didn’t care anymore about seeing what happened next … then I’d really be dead. Maybe resting in peace.
Maybe just dead.
Why would you chase a ghost?
For revenge? For love?
Or to find out what happened?
Every known culture has ghosts. Some psychologists and anthropologists suggest that the concept of personhood is, in essence, so strong that it continues to adhere to the body after death. A cognitive specter created by the belief of others. You’re only as much of a person as others believe you to be, after all.
Thrownness. A word from existential philosophy meaning that we are thrown, tossed up sputtering and confused, into a world of which we knew nothing, and which we had no choices about. Robert Blackwood sputters a bit more than most, perhaps. Why those parents? Why that house? What did he do to deserve the privilege and pox of his heritage?
We only exist because of an infinite series of coincidences and choices by others. The girl smiled at this soldier, not that one. The hunter chose this glade, not that one. Your parents took this plane, not that one. It can drive you mad to think on it too long, your very being dangling off the precipice of a rickety tower of improbabilities. The only cure for that madness is to turn the past into a sensible story, a rational history. The only way it could have happened, really. You aren’t improbable. You are inevitable.
We tidy up the past with stories, and we wait to see new chapters that will unfold.
Historians. Politicians. Scientists. Parents. Artists. Ghosts.
Join us.
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