- OTHER MEDIA
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- Perform: 'Attrition' traces the unseen connections in four lives
- SF Chronicle October 11, 2007 (Reyhan Harmanci)
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- Unlike many writers who shy away from admitting that their fictional
characters have real-life counterparts, playwright and director Marilee
Talkington freely admits that she drew upon her own life to flesh out her
play "Attrition."
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- "I wrote it this year but started thinking about it six or seven
months before that," Talkington says. Her play features four characters
who face trauma in different forms: a girl in her teens who is a cutter,
a female poet in her 70s, a male prisoner who grew up in an abusive family
and a female executive whose decision to skydive opens up all kinds of
psychic wounds.
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- "I started playing around with it in my head. It sort of manifested
from people I had met - and the skydiving, I had that experience. I jumped
out of a plane and started having flashbacks. The poet character, I based
it on my grandmother who I'm living with right now."
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- On the surface, Talkington's characters don't have much in common,
but unseen connections surface. "I wanted to tie four people in very
separate, isolated places in their lives together. They have bonds that
they don't even know about.
- "The play is about connectivity and isolation, how we feel isolated
and like no one understands when, in fact, many people do."
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- To achieve this, Talkington aimed for a fugue-like structure, both
in her writing and in the staging. The four people stay onstage for the
duration of the show - their narratives bumping into each other and overlapping
without ever actually conversing.
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- "Like Bach, it's four different melodies, but put together it
makes a whole melody by itself," she says. "The dialogue is going
boom-boom-boom."
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- Talkington is a graduate of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco
and a veteran of the San Francisco and Edinburgh Fringe festivals. She
directed her play "The Rape Poems" (based on the Frances Driscoll
book of the same name) in San Francisco, Edinburgh and New York. She had
a different process for creating "Attrition" than she had for
her other works. Instead of working with actors from an outline, she wrote
the entire script herself.
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- "I didn't realize how hard it would be - it's such a challenging
script for the actors," she says. "All the narratives are separate,
and the timing has to be perfect."
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- Talkington also says she's never been calmer before a show's opening.
"Something about this project is keeping me very level and present."
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