Director's Notes

The artistic process is a strange, unpredictable, terrifying beast that lives in the creatively minded and spends its days begging to leap from its masters' chest cavity and into the world of theater. The process of writing, directing and starring in "Smack Addict: A Nocturne In Three Movements?" resulted in the kind of catharsis that can only be attained when one lets that rabid mad dog that is Art off of its leash and lets it tear at the audience's throats. I would like to think that I did not conceive of this story, I simply let it emerge from the ether that is the muse of writing.

The challenges we face living in modern urban environments seem insurmountable. One might often feel adrift, a lost wayfarer in a sea of despair that isn't really a sea but is actually a major metropolitan city. The character of Rhoda is just such a wayfarer. Rhoda's journey from suburban stay at home mother of four to drug-riddled tarot card reader/prostitute forces us to ask the difficult questions. What is truth? How far may one fall before cracking their teeth on the gutter, metaphorically and literally? Is truth real? How poor is too poor? And finally, is this play happening? I assure you, it is.

My intentions in creating this work were to portray real people struggling in a real world. It ended up a story of real people struggling in a dystopian, magical-surrealist world. It is a story of humanity, not a thinly veiled platform for me to tout my political ideals. That being said, much of act two is about Israel.

A note on the dialect: I modeled the speech patterns of Rhoda and her lover Clarence Thomas after the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the dialogue after the lyrics of Phil Collins. The characters' voices are not intended to sound like those of people, but rather people pretending to be people.

Thank you to the Newbury Community Rec Center for hosting this production, and to all of you for your support.

Learn, live, laugh, cry, think, question, and seek,

Chauncey Masterson