áfall/trauma

by a rawlings
Forthcoming from Broken Dimanche Press

In Áfall / Trauma, the body in crisis confronts narrative, diagnostics, and identification in relation to the self, society, cultural habit, non-human entities, and land. Cancer treatment becomes a vessel to experience a ‘theatre of the rural’— isolating, intimate, discomfiting, and where the private commons are a stage for semi-public conversation between and about a person and a person and a land. Áfall / Trauma functions as lived performance, with scripts designed for expansive interpretive flexibility.

A series of imperative, graphic, and/or monologic scripts share one of three identical names— “The Play,” “The Room,” “The Relationship.” Each script revolves around one or more of a woman, some men, horses, the glacier, the room, the breast, Death, the land, the trash, language, and I. As some scripts are set in Iceland, foreign-language inclusion translates experience of situational dysfluency, unanticipated beauty and barrier, and vulnerability to the unknown. Áfall / Trauma’s only hope rests in transformative action.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights.