BINIBON

[ellenkushner]

A quick note to let New Yorkers know that BINIBON, the highly interstitial Jack Womack/Elliot Sharp collaboration at The Kitchen thru May 9th is very much worth seeing! Acting & direction are terrific. But it's all about Jack's language - sheer poetry, describing the New York we lived in in 1981. A dangerous place. It no longer exists. Very much the NYC I wrote Swordspoint in and about. Jack's characters - waitress, transvestite, teen graffiti artist - ghosts of the night Jack Henry Abbott killed that guy at the Binibon cafe - recall it in speeches so sharp and funny and moving I had to keep myself from rocking back & forth, sticking up my hand and yelling, "Oh, yeah! Tell it, baby!"

They guy playing Abbott is just chilling. As the Narrator (a shaky former jazz drummer) describes him (yeah, I got Jack to send me the script) :
Always a new nightmare somewhere at hand
New York the font of all head-busting violence
A good murder always gets your attention
Writers’s minds especially
Inspiration sparks and sets talent to play
Some are blessed with more talent than they know how to handle
Now Jack Henry Abbott {VIDEO: PRISON}
was one of those sorts
Jack Henry was a writer
Jack Henry was a prisoner
Jack Henry was a knife-driving man
A punk and a convict and walking DSM IV
He'd as soon kill you as look at you
But he knew how to tell a good story
And he knew how to spin a good line
And he knew audiences hear what they most want to hear

One of Abbot's great speeches describes what it's like to knife someone:

Easy really
There you are
There he is
And then
There he was
And you're why
It's in you or isn't
And once it's done
You don't walk taller
You don't stand prouder
You just move faster
Next time around

Comments

[themaskmaker.livejournal.com]

Funny how we can have nostalgia for danger, isn't it? Is it because life seemed sharper around the edges, then?

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Economic problems that are bad but not depression level tend to make people feel squashed.

All of us who can remember the 70s and 80s are blunted by age.