alexandra collier

An Ode to Poe

Mon, 07 May 2012 21:06:00 -0400

Mac had us write ridiculous Edgar Allen Poe stories for Dictionaries class. Here’s mine…

—-

The Angel of Chantix

It is not to abase myself that I encumber you with the remembrance of the terrible travails that plagued the winter of my 33^rd year. But inexplicably, I find in myself an urgent desire to exhume the story of my gloomy experiences, if for no other reason than to be lightened of those nightmarish days and nights which have hung about my neck like a torpid chain lashing me tight to the decaying earth upon which we inhabit.

Edgar himself - I believe we both share a lazy eye

I had found myself in a state of utter decrepitude brought about by the realisation of my hastening and ever nearing decease as the day of my birth approached. I took to staring at myself each morning in a tarnished mirror which hung in the grim quarters in which I dwelled, about which a sooty and pallid smoke blew in from the city’s desultory smog that spiraled hither and thither up from the deep and acrid subway tunnels that wound their way like catacombs beneath the city, through which lumbered day and night those rattling beasts that conveyed the minions who were engaged in ceaseless peregrinations to and fro along the gridlines of the city towards which I never dared to venture. That is to say, I would not have wished, nor did ever attempt to find myself crossing the divide either east or west or over and beyond 14^th street to explore the horrors that lurked in the dark recesses of the island’s edges and in its towering penthouses and further above that the void of highways snaking upwards and even further, the utter ennui that attended those who inhabited the far reaches of upstate that some declared were Eden but I desired not to know whether this apocryphal tale held some truth, for I could not bring myself to leave my maison, even if I had wanted to. For I was mired in a strange and restless state, confined to my bedchamber whence I was not staring at myself in the bronze framed mirror, and finding that my eyes were glowing dimmer by the day, that those once bright orbs were now covered in a filmy residue approaching the state of milky cataracts, the skin about my lids pinched into thin and spreading lines and the graying pallor of my personage always staring grimly back at me and what last glimmers of my youth exhaling themself with each foggy breath that confounded the mirror’s surface.

I must tell you that I had indeed stepped beyond the heavy doors of my cluttered and rancid rooms some months earlier, but since then had never found occasion to leave again. I had made the trip before my despair had started to creep like a Ficus Annunciata that cunningly wound about my personage ensnaring me within my abode, to visit my local doctor. As I sat in his waiting rooms listening to the abominations of the tinny piping of saxophone through the conveyances of sound affixed to the walls, it struck me that this was no euphony that could be said to bear any resemblance to the mellifluous wonder that one calls music. About me, I was surrounded by those whose state appeared worse than my own. The grating and rancorous coughing of the city’s most unattractive inhabitants sat slumped in the tattered Ikea chairs that had once, no doubt, resembled some shade of cornflower blue and chlorophonous green but were now mottled and mouldy in appearance, not unlike murky weeds that might hang listlessly at the bottom of a fetid pond. I had waited some hours before the creaking door to the doctor’s rooms opened and I heard my name called from the dark interior by a faceless personage.

“Armitage!”

Then again, “Armitage!”

Then a third time: “Armitage!”

I shook myself from the hazy torpor of near sleep that my eyelids were descending towards and unsteadily stood and moved into the doctor’s chambers. He sat in his creaking vinyl chair and waved me towards a white hospital bed while shuffling through the numerous pages of my hypochondriachal files, as pieces of foolscap littered this way and that upon the stained floors, where I thought for a second I mistook the sight of blood splotched about in small pools, but looked again to find it was but the scuttling of large beetles scurrying their way towards the cracks in the walls and floorboards.

“What is the matter this time, Armitage?” the doctor grunted contemptuously, which seemed an unnecessary jab, given that I had not made any complaint for at least seven days upon his professional offices. I replied by given him a detailed description of my symptoms, which ranged from a strange tingling in my left toe to a murmuring in my right lung, to a twitch above my third eye, a general sense of dizzying malaise and, after I had continued for some thirty-four minutes upon the clock, I finished with a brief account of my unshakeable attachment to tobacco.

For most of my dispatch, the doctor had appeared to go into a trancelike state, which I imagined to be extreme and exertinous concentration. But once I mentioned the word “tobacco,” he jolted to life, like Lazarus rising suddenly from his tomb.

“Tobocco, eh?” he asked. I nodded my assent. To which he began scribbling in his prescription book and ripped off a sheaf of paper with scrawl that was barely discernible.

“Chantix,” he said.

“Chantix?”

“Chantix.”

“Chantix?”

“Chantix!” he yelled. “Take it thrice a day.”

Afterwhich he hurriedly expelled me from his rooms and after an alltoolong trip to the local pharmaceuticologist, I found my way back home with nothing but a small clear orange vial to stare at, with my name and the incomprehensible details of the medicinal properties that were to enable the cure for all my ailments.

I began to take the small pills religiously three times a day as the doctor prescribed. And found that, indeed, my ardent desire for those elegant wands of nicotine did absent itself from my being. So too the ability to slumber had disappeared. And so I sat up night after day after night, eyes bloodshot and brimming with tears, often throwing myself upon the floor, weeping and gnashing my teeth and imploring the Good Angel of Sleep to visit me. She declined. Enduring this fright for some weeks, I resolved myself to take matters in my own hands. I began to drink. Dragging all my supplies from my damp and creptitudinous cellar, I imbibed bottle after bottle of inexpensive wine that I could place my hands on. And some of my neighbours besides. I reasoned that they would not miss it for they were too besotted most days to know whether it was noontime or evening. I then moved onto a cask of Amontilladofollowed by a hearty flagon of rum and a scant dribble of Kirschenwasser. When my supplies ran low, I threw open the pantry doors and unearthed the last remnants of vinegar, cough syrup and turpentine. But, alas, nothing worked. I still could not succumb to the vagaries of SLEEP! She eluded me by a thousand leagues.

As the days and nights wore on, I found that I was visited by waking bloodcurdling nightmares of the city’s vermin climbing my fire escape and rattling at my windows to find entrance. As I was never asleep, I never awoke from these terrifying visitations and the last dregs of my spent and pale form were enslaved to repeatedly pull back the heavy brocaded curtain to find that no man nor woman nor rat nor cockroach had found its way up to my window but rather the pale red moon hung in the sky, neither waxing nor waning, it seemed, for all the days ran into one and my undesired birthdate was still rapidly approaching.

I resolved on the eve of that approaching malodorous day that I would take my own life, as I was thoroughly tired of my misfortunes. And so throwing back the sash, I vowed to open the window and leap to my decease. After wrestling with the window for some time, I noted that my landlord had painted it shut and resolved to bring about his decease if I could not bring my own before it. I decided to battle glass with glass and taking a bottle of empty rum, I threw it against the window. There was a cacophonous smash. Nobody in the building stirred, for this was an all too regular occurrence. I had made a sizeable jagged hole through which I reasoned my body could fall to its well-timely death. I began to mouse my head through the window, resolving that my mind would be the first to go. Thus I threw my decrepit form some twenty stories. I can say that after and whereupon falling the first two stories, I did wonder whether perhaps I had made a mistake. Upon thinking this I glanced below to see a vast white billowing cloud appear. On closer inspection, it was not a cloud, methought, but a strange ovular shape on which tiny letters were imprinted: “Chantix.” And so I fell into this bitter pill which cushioned my descent and bounced me back like someforth trampoline so that I landed squarely in the chimney of my own building and slithered down, covered in soot to crash in my verily own bedchamber. Thus I awoke to find myself on the floor of my garret, surrounded by drained bottles and that empty orange vial emblazoned with those words: “Chantix.” I looked to the clock and the calendar and found it to be 4am after the same day to which I had visited the doctor. But for a mild headache, I was thoroughly cured of my ills besides a lingering sense of melancholy and unease, which has wafted about my asymmetrical haircut and matched itself to my profession as a skinny jean wearing aficionado and poetess of the theatre to this very day.

And so it was that the baleful and redemptive Angel of Chantix thus taught me her lesson to resume my doleful existence.

I read things...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:37:03 -0400

Tonight, I will be reading all the voices in my plays…

And there will be wine.

——

Please join us on Friday, April 27 for the Brooklyn Writers Space Reading Series with readings by ALEXANDRA COLLIER, IDRA NOVEY, SHIVANI MANGHNANI and CONOR DOUGHERTY.

The events begins at 7pm and wine will be served.

BROOKLYN WRITERS SPACE READING SERIES

Friday, April 27, 2012

BookCourt

163 Court Street (between Pacific and Dean)

7pm

FREE

Don’t Come Over

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 22:39:07 -0400

Don’t Come Over

The Lag

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:06:24 -0500

In the middle of the night, I woke and shuffled half-awake to the bathroom, with no idea of where I was. I knew I lived somewhere in Brooklyn but surely this wasn’t the place. I tried to recall the faces of my roommates, stared at the dark still shapes of the living room, illuminated by the leaky grey light from the window, but nothing concrete came to mind by the time I had returned to my bedroom.

The night before that I went to bed at 12:00am and woke later on, bright and alert, only to turn over in bed and find that the mean blinking orange of my clock read 1:30am.

I mete out the pretty little sleeping tablets my mum gave me in half portions. They are gone after three days. Or should I say three nights. Because I am not sure what time it is. I flew back from the future and gained a day. In the early evenings, and the mornings, and the afternoons, a strange whirring exhaustion encircles me and I wonder if this is what dying feels like.

I wonder if there is a charity for insomniacs and resolve at 2am that I should donate them a large sum of money for their collective pain.

I realise that all airplane pilots and flight attendants are criminally insane — after all how do they work on a topsy-turvy schedule of sleeplessness? Just know that when a stewardess is smiling at you and asking you what you would like to drink and you ask for extra milk in your tea, she is so exhausted that she probably wants to stab you repeatedly with a small plastic fork.

I flew from a subtropical summer and found myself in New York winter. It makes sense that travelling the world used to take months in a leaky ship because, who the hell are we kidding, the body needs that long to adjust to this inconceivable shift in geography and time.

I feel the drift of sleep tug me and I say yes yes yes please please please but I miss the wave and find myself wide-awake ten minutes later, writing a short rom com in my head that wins me an Oscar. The rom com seems utterly hilarious and original at 3am and so cliché I could weep the next day.

Oh sleep, I miss you. Please can we be friends, again?

Brooklyn to Bondi

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:30:00 -0500

Bondi Beach seems to be the locus of all the world’s most proportionate people: long tanned legs, perfect triangular torsos and the bland and blameless faces of the square jawed, small nosed and high cheek boned. I wonder what ions in the water drew them all to this part of the coastal jag of Australia. Or what series of pinpointable events lead each sculpted-stomached being here (surely there was more to each life story that began with “I was born and decreed to be beautiful” and lead to the inevitable ending: “I live in Bondi”).

I ran this morning along the track that follows the smoothed and hollowed out cliff-faces of Bondi towards Bronte - the ocean whips at the saltwater lap pool at Icebergs, a woman with a Madonna-mike (to be heard over the crash of the waves) guides a yoga class of sweating waifs who salute the big blue, tourists amble and point and slow down in my way along the steps that go up down up down up down as we climb the cliff (please god don’t let me stop running because I’ll never start again). As I round the bend I see the white-toothed gravestones of Bronte cemetery, and then I’m at Tamarama (this tiny little wonder of a beach, a mere cove but with fierce white waves and some dazed looking lifesavers sprawled almost horizontal watching the four or five swimmers wrestle with the surf). I wonder at being a lifesaver – the 360-odd days of boredom with sand in your shorts must be made up for by those three or four moments of sheer terror and excitement when someone almost drowns and you are called to the rescue. Or maybe I have the stats wrong and it’s the other way around.

The locals call the beach Glamarama – is it one of those nasty Australian in-jokes, a cruel irony, a pinned on name to show what it clearly is not?Or does it refer to the trim torsos on the beach, to Sydney’s obsession with showy glam? There are no surfers at Glamarama today. I try and remember my 15-year-old surf-lifesaving training from the cruel coastal waters of Victoria, reading the churning lines of water frothing this way and that to detect a rip, but I fear my surf savvy has receded like the tide.

My thoughts whip around as unpredictably as the sea-spray: what does it mean to be a writer, why do we do it? Is this a noble pursuit or the most narcissistic profession imaginable? I fear that if I can’t find a reason in the middle of this all this churning, maybe like those ill-fated tourists who always chose to swim at the wrong end of Bondi, I’ll drown.

I am rehearsing a play of mine at STC, which will be read for the public at the end of the week. I started writing the play a year and a half ago: it’s set in the dead red centre of Australia, in a small dusty town. I wonder at this strange beast the play has become, separate to me and of me at the same time. I climb the track running up up up, zigzagging past the dog runners and the dilly-dallyers. My arms and legs ache like foreign limbs, as if they might fall off my body, as if pieces of myself were as angular and jagged as a Picasso. I started writing the play at a silent writer’s retreat in the Catskills with Erik Ehn: the bald and wondrous guru of playwriting. On the first day, gathered mute in a circle, all the writers looked at him wide-eyed as he described the original meaning of sin: to be out of step with oneself, out of place. Forget about guilt and reprobation. This was a definition of sin I could really get behind.Here I was in upstate New York, in a strange sticky summer with forested smells that weren’t recognizable to me (no eucalypt or jasmine or frangipani) and I thought: I am literally out of place. I don’t belong here. This is not my country And so I thought, Fuck it. I’m going to write an Australian play. And that’s the beginning of the story, and the story now is me in Sydney working on Underland. But there’s a lot between the beginning and the now, a lot I won’t bore you with. Or a lot I can’t explain: like Japanese businessmen crawling out of the earth from Tokyo, men who might be crocodiles, the nasty sharp edged love between schoolgirls, the terror of the Australian desert landscape for whities (that endless and infinite dry that runs hot by day and icy by night and can kill you just for getting in the middle of it). But for all of that you’ll just have to come see the reading yourself.

——

(somehow this meandered its way into a plug… here are the details below, fab cast and director and it’s free!)

Underland
By Alexandra Collier
Directed by Paige Rattray

Featuring Yure Covich, Anna Lise Phillips, Shari Sebbens, Amanda McGregor, Annie Byron and Shingo Usami

A small dusty town gets hit by love, loss and animals that attack…

Friday January 27th
@ 6:30pm
Free!

Sydney Theatre

Richard Wherrett Studio
22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay (opposite pier 6/7)

Book tix - STC box office (02) 9250 1777

"The future is called ‘perhaps’, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And..."

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:22:53 -0500

“The future is called ‘perhaps’, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

- Tennessee Williams

Middlefish

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:13:00 -0500

Chaz and I had hipster Thai in Carlton. It was spicy.

Willow’s One Night Stand

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:16:00 -0500

Ok – so I am back and blogging. Here are some photos from my recent musical written with composer/singer-songwriter Greta Gertler of The Universal Thump: Willow’s One Night Stand.

Featuring the inimitable Matt Steiner and Pearl Rhein, directed by Ben Vershbow and performed inthe Farrington Loft in Brooklyn for our newly launched Come Home with Me series.

So what’s the story?

Willow meets boy. Takes boy home. Then there’s a medley of tunes featuring rutabagas, breast obsessions, barking dogs, creatures in the night and more…

Tunes to come… we are doing a demo session soon!

Matt yearns

Approaching the Beast

Matt goes home with Willo

Fondling the Rutabaga

Willow & Matt get fresh

Willow wonders

Me & Georgia Clark, post-show