Sibyl Kempson

A play meant to challenge our normalized expectations of cause and effect, to suggest post-logical incoherence as the basis of human motivation, feeling, and violence, and to threaten our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater and identity as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.

Set in Alabama at the scene of James Agee and Walker Evans’s famous reporting, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag brings Sibyl Kempson’s attention to the ethical snares of poetic journalism and what it means to work on the land. She interrogates the strange energy of images, both their potential to anesthetize response, and their invitation to be approached as hermeneutic thresholds between visible and invisible orders. Interwoven with sources from Agee and Walker to Sontag, to inscriptions on Assyrian mythological seals, and nested in a set of images from other performances, the play holds forth in its own genre, a bad-ventriloquism visitation seed-eating prayer ceremony with songs. The entire score, composed by Kempson’s longtime collaborator Ashley Turba, completes the book.