Theater
Earthy Void: Plan for an Epic Play

Scene One
The Toadstool sings a song lamenting that his life is at a standstill. He can’t go anywhere. He feels damp. An expansive fungus creeps in to enlighten the toadstool. Fungi can take over the world! The toadstool must spread his roots and travel to exotic places.
Scene Two
A farm in Nebraska. A field of cows. They low for some time. Then Paris Hilton arrives. She must milk one of them. The cows all try to convince her to pick them. They either want to be on TV, or they have the hots for Paris (in the latter case, it seems they would be lesbian cows). The cows perform daring feats of physical prowess. Paris Hilton picks one of the cows and milks her.
Scene Three
The farmhand who tends to the cows is appalled at their sycophantic display of feats of physical prowess. He thought he knew the cows. He thought they were humble creatures. His world has been turned upside down. He wonders if he will ever find love. He throws down his pitchfork and sets out on a journey.
Scene Four
The farmhand comes to a crossroads. He cannot decide which way to go. A carnival comes up behind him. He must decide which way to go or the carnival cannot pass. The head of the carnival is a beautiful, gruff woman in a top hat. She must get to the next town before nightfall. She straps the farmhand to one of the elephants, and off they go.
Scene Five
Meanwhile, the toadstool is stretching its long fungal roots across the country. He passes the scene of a domestic dispute. He crawls around and through a buried corpse, which tells the toadstool the sad story of its demise. He stretches under a river teeming with ambitious crawfish. He crawls through the mud under a young girl playing and tickles her toes. He now covers most of America. But he wonders why.
Scene Six
The farmhand now cares for the carnival elephants, but he is suspicious of them. He does not trust any of their acts of kindness. They bring him chocolates, which he loves, but he cannot return their affection. The elephants cry, and the head of the carnival whips the farmhand.
Scene Seven
The toadstool encounters the elephants’ tears in the earth. He stops. The farmhand’s tears soon follow. Then the tears of the beautiful head of the carnival. The toadstool emerges into the sunlight and falls in love with the beautiful head of the carnival. She also falls in love with him, but the carnival ground is too dry. The toadstool begins to die. But he refuses to go back underground. The carnival puts on a special performance over the toadstool as he dies. The elephants dance.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Sunnylyn Thibodeauxs The World Exactly
By Neeli CherkovskiDEC 21-JAN 22 | Poetry
The World Exactly by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is one of the finest collections of poetry by a San Francisco poet published in years. Here is the mysterious concision of daily life in a poetry that is decidedly philosophical, yet devoid of the bamboozling rhetoric.

Pompeii in Color: The Life of Roman Painting
By Ann McCoyMAY 2022 | ArtSeen
The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE preserved the world of Pompeii and Herculaneum like a bee in amber. Serious excavations, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, began to pull the curtain back on these intimate lives that were terminated in an instant.
All What I Want is Life
By Ruba Al-SweelJUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen
Seldom is civil unrest in the Arab world discussed beyond hushed dinner conversations or in the context of economic decay on corporate roundtables. In Dubais center for photography, Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), however, its the topic du jour. A pictorial and filmic essay drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan, All What I Want is Life takes its title from a cri de cur strewn across the walls of the Saadoun Tunnel in graffiti in Baghdad. This is an exhibition of protest photography, not photojournalism
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound
By David CarrierAPRIL 2022 | ArtSeen
Bouabré said that he didnt work from his imagination, but drew what delighted him. His delights included cloud formations; the natural markings on the surfaces of oranges, bananas, kola nuts, and leaves; numbering systems; and, more broadly, what he called knowledge of the world.