Donna Perkins, who teaches theater arts at CCAC, has always been devoted to the moment, not only the intensely lived moments of her life, but also the intensely expressed moments of the theater.
In her plays and films, she wishes to capture the ephemeral, the surprise, the happenstance revelation.
For more than a decade, she’s presented her impromptu plays throughout Pittsburgh and environs, in unusual locations such as art galleries, alleyways, the Duquesne Club, The Plaza, Central Park, residences in Fox Chapel, Squirrel Hill, and Shadyside—and once even in a swimming pool. She seems to know everyone, and no one can forget her. She’s an elemental force of nature, always appearing and disappearing, but essentially mysterious, an extrovert, but with a deep reserve, like a wise eremitical nun going about the world in the disguise of an exuberant, and much photographed, star.
One of her central plays, “The Museum of Obsolete People,” reflects her interest in ephemera not only in the subject matter—the obsolete people who, though valuable and lovable, are nevertheless treated as obsolete items in a museum case—but also in the manner of composition.
She has been writing and rewriting the play, performing it, and re-performing it, for years. But when she rewrites, she doesn’t merely add a few lines, toggle a few words, delete a character, and add a scene. Instead, she rewrites the play entirely, leaving only the framework, the museum in which her obsolete people display themselves as if hoping to be accepted or loved. But more than this, she leaves most of the lines for the actors to invent spontaneously, in the moment of performance. She writes the background, the motivations, perhaps a key phrase, the scenario, the vision—and trusts her actors to find the surprise.
If you ever have the chance to see one of her plays or films, go. Many are by invitation only, but strangers found on the sidewalk, or lost in a building, have sometimes received surprise invitations. To see a play or film by Donna Perkins is to become renewed, to see surprises everywhere, and to be prepared to live an intense next moment.
You can watch videos by Donna Perkins at https://www.youtube.com/user/donnaeperkins/videos.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon. Consider reading it because you might like it.