Thank You Letter To Paul Gertner for his Donations to our Play through Materials for the Arts

Dear Paul Gertner,

Thank you for your donation to Materials for the Arts.  The building supplies, paints, and hardware items that you generously recycled is being used for ‘Oedipus after Colonus’ an Off-Broadway play taking place September 8-12, 7pm at HERE, located at 145 6^th Ave on Dominick St.  For publicity the company is doing a piece called ‘Memory Theater’, it is a one-on-one theater event taking place in parks around Manhattan where we are blindfolding willing participants, guiding them and recording their personal answers to questions concerning memory.  We will be posting the results on our blog oedipusaftercolonus.tumblr.com.  We have heard many beautiful stories, personal details from the archives of these otherwise unheard minds.  We are logging personal histories. 

This is very similar to our formal play that dives into the psyche of the famed blind king Oedipus and tries to make guesses at the unknowable question of ‘What happens when we die?’ do you have an answer to that?  In our show we don’t think there is a conclusion that is accurate, but we are interested in the way that everyone has a guess about the great other, the ultimate end.  Everyone and anything that ever lived is now a body decayed in rot.  Our history lives dissolved in the earth.  The words of mythology however have been passed down between the living storytellers, and it is in fact words, and now images, that make up our own authority while living.

Thank you so much for helping our company to bring the language of the famed living poet Robert Kelly into vivid performance, your objects are currently being woven into the fabric of metaphor and slimily as we speak.

All the best to you and your business.  Thank you, always, for your generosity in supporting the arts.  In hindsight, the certainty and sciences of yesterday are considered blind mistakes compared to what we know now.  Similarly our science and technology is doomed to a similar fate, it will be laughable once the wave of progress has moved us onto other tools and faster ways of bending nature to the wills and desires of humanity.  But the writers of the human condition stay our friends and our contemporaries, be they Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, or Poe.  Having only the reality of their perception to guide them, and not claiming to know more than themselves, their readings of other writers, other thinkers, other doers, their knowledge of life, becomes a gateways for us to understand our own identity and our surroundings.  The objects that you have given to our show are being transformed from their practicality into instruments that speak a language similar to music with their form, reintroduced by the staging and inference of our play. 

I hope that you can make it to the show.

Thanks,