As published in Frankly Speaking: A Collection of Essays, Writings & Rants.
by Frank Moore, Thursday, September 19, 1996.
I originally wrote the play to have something to do with a guy, who would direct it.
I wrote it as a prose poem. As a poem, it has been published in many magazines and books in both the U.S. and England. One of the most amazing stories around the poem version of OUT OF ISOLATION is…
A 40 year old woman somewhere in the Midwest read it in a zine and started thinking about her baby sister who she had loved. The doctors told the parents the baby sister would be a vegetable without an IQ…and they should put her in an institution, put her out of their minds/hearts, and went on with their lives. Unlike my parents, they followed the doctors’ advice. But after reading OUT OF ISOLATION, the woman hired a detective to find her sister, without telling her parents (because the guilt would be too much…and pointless). It turned out the sister only had a slight case of cp, was adopted and has a successful life. The sisters re established their relationship.
If this was the only effect of my work, my work and life would be successful.
Anyway, when we were ready to cast the play, the director just chose an actress from the very first audition because he didn’t think we could get what we needed, so he settled…even though I told him when I direct I usually spend months finding the willing person for a part. But he was the director. The actress made it very clear from the start she wouldn’t do nudity. So the director threw out the nudity, not realizing that the nudity was not the real problem. The woman had a hard time even touching me! But the kicker was the actress saw the play as the nurse getting JIM out of the institution and into “the real world”. She kept making Jim look out a window to motivate him. I finally suggested to the director that he should tell her there ain’t no window. She totally freaked out and wrote us a Dear John letter. At that point he gave up on the project.
It took me a year after that to cast it. Linda Sibio had been in several of my ritual performances in Los Angeles….and she is a great performance artist in her own right. When I couldn’t find anybody in the San Francisco Bay Area, I asked her. She is very picky about what she enters into, but once she commits, she will do anything. We went down to L.A. for a week to shoot it. I had planned the first day to rehearse the whole piece…but when we were on the mat…without my board or Linda Mac…Linda Sibio just took off her clothes and eroplayed with me for two hours…and of course I’m flexible! Afterwards she said it was what she needed to get into the space/role. So we just shot the piece straight through each day for four days. I just spent a half hour before each day’s shooting going over with her the needed changes. The rest was improv.
Out of Isolation complete video
Raw footage
