David Lang

A brief overview and focus on composers Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, John Cage, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter and their contemporaries.

In the winter of 2012, two famous American performance artists sat in anonymous hotel rooms on the West Coast, waiting to take the stage, and in a bizarre coincidence, over-dosed on the anxiety drug Xanax. One survived, one did not. The two individuals are Whitney Houston, who tragically died, and the author of this piece, who lived. Incarcerated in a psychiatric ward, the author began an arduous and experimental journey towards recovery. What is life, and why should we live it, having had it thrust upon us like the assigned reading of a baffling mystery novel, the chapters jumbled, the text often incomprehensible? In the thirty-seven years of life leading up to this event, we find a simple but elusive answer: Love.

A haunting take on jealousy, this existential thriller posits a man, a woman, and an elusive lover in a series of intense pas de deux in a stark apartment that becomes a fourth character.