10 to 4

10 to 4 is an acoustic play which twists shards of political activism and thought’s aging into the brain of language. The play posits a “language brain”: given that we’ve evolved brains specifically designed to hide their workings from us, what hide-and-seek might we play if brain were actual language and not only linguistic function?

Early in the play, one of the two main characters says, “What’s in my head, what I gotta think—what I’ve got to think—I’ll lay it out for you”. The stage becomes the inside of his brain, a hectic hub-bub of sentences, parts of speech, linguistic gestures, inflections, vocal timbres, a half inch of cerebrum sentence-snarl, “Bullshit! I can see right through this!!”

The title of play refers to activities happening ten minutes before a 4 o’clock weekly Saturday afternoon protest against Blackwater. This protest is organized by one of the main characters, an eccentric and committed political activist who has created his activism, his politics, and his commitment as a composer creates music, whimsy to fact. The Schumann-singing activist bumps into a young neighbor who neither has any interest in the activist’s thinking nor takes any pleasure in his own (“my neural networks suck”).

Throughout the play three such Saturdays occur at 10 minutes before the 4 o’clock protest, where the question “You coming with?” hangs upside down—a kind of linguistic bat—asked by the activist to his new friend amidst a clamor of metronomes and dinging egg timers. Learning and other colonizing acts happen during this spanse of Saturdays. While the activist slowly decays from discoverer to mere teacher (“I’m Christopher Columbus, not Professor Columbus!”) under the pressure of his new friendship, his young friend is visited by his own brain made flesh—a multiversa of language hullabaloo, hullaba-do, and—finally—hullaba-don’t.

7 p.m. Saturday, January 29
7 p.m. Sunday, January 30