Excavation
by Katt Lissard
March 10, 2000
Co-sponsored by Pitt-Bradford's Women's History Month Committee

The staged reading of Excavation was presented as part of BLT's Playwright-in-Residence program

About the Show  ·  Cast List  ·  About the Playwright  ·  Epilogue
 

About the Show

Excavation is a montage piece which jumps back and forth through time—between America of the mid-1800s and the corporate corridors and science labs of today.

The play’s genesis is the story of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who, in 1848, was in an unfortunate and bizarre on-the-job accident. A tamping rod used to blast holes into rock in order to lay railroad ties exploded prematurely, sending the pointed, 36-inch piece of metal up through Gage’s left eye and out the top of his head, taking a piece of the prefrontal lobe of his brain with it.

Miraculously, Gage survived the accident and recovered completely, except for the obvious loss of vision in his left eye. Gage, in the physical sense, was fine, but as time went on it became apparent that Gage the person had changed drastically. Before the accident, he’d been a responsible and competent worker looked up to by his fellow railroad men, but when he returned to the job he was a different man. He cursed constantly, fought violently over nothing, and was completely unreliable. Most intriguing of all, he could no longer make moral or ethical decisions. He had lost the core of who he was. "Gage," said people who knew him, "was no longer Gage."

Excavation begins where Gage’s macabre accident left him. After his encounter with the tamping rod, Phineas Gage became a vagabond. He did a stint in the Barnun Museum as an attraction, traveled as far south as Chile, and left a trail of trouble across the Western and Southwestern United States, eventually ending up in San Francisco where he died.

Although he had no known children, Excavation gives Gage a daughter who searches for her father by trying to trace the erratic path he leaves through his altered world. Her search becomes a journey into questions of the mind, the soul, and the brain, presented in jumpcut counter-point to new-millennial scientific behavioral experimentation, corporate manipulation, and the wrenching journal-keeping of another daughter, in the present day, tracking her father’s disintegration through the ravaging effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Excavation moves with both daughters as they travel through twisted worlds full of unanswered questions and necessary humor.

-- Katt Lissard

Cast List

Margie Brown—The Journal Keeper
     Margie, a teacher at Bradford Area High School, serves on BLT’s Board of Directors.

Bob Duncan—Young Businessman #1/The Head Man/The Bar Tender
     Bob, from Mt. Jewett, is a senior public relations major at Pitt-Bradford. He is this year’s recipient of the Robert C. Laing Creative Arts Award in Theatre.

Chris Mackowski (Director)—Stage Directions/Father
     Chris writes plays and serves on BLT’s Board of Directors. He works at Pitt-Bradford.

Chris Merry—A Guard/The Old Man/Male Scientist/Patched Man #1/Sheriff
     Father Merry is the parochial vicor of St. Bernard’s Church in Bradford. This is his first time working with BLT.

Duane Pletcher—The Man
     Duane, a founding member of BLT who’s currently serving as president, is the chair of the English Department at Bradford Area High School.

Don Sparr—Young Businessman #2/Patched Man #2/The Professor/A Volunteer/An Opponent
     Don, a senior communications major at Pitt-Bradford, is from Shillington. He has acted in a number of shows at the college.

Stephanie Witman—A Singer/Female Scientist/A Whore
     Steph, from Litiz, PA, is a senior history/political science major at Pitt-Bradford. She is a 1999 recipient of the Robert C. Laing Creative Arts Award in Theatre.

Katie Yurick—The Young Woman
     A freshman at Pitt-Bradford, Katie is a communications major from Warren. She recently performed the lead in the college’s production of Women of Troy.

(In the photo: (from left, back row) Cast members Merry, Yurick, Pletcher, Bob Duncan, and director Chris Mackowski; (from left, front row) Sparr, playwright Lissard, Stephanie A. Duncan, and Brown.)

About the Playwright

Katt Lissard has taught introductory theatre at Fordham at Lincoln Center and was playwright-in-residence for Smith College’s Interterm Session. Smith also produced her play, Beat the Air. She currently teaches theatre and creativity studies at the State University of New York’s Empire State College, where she is an associate for two programs: the Theatre for Adolescent Survival Project, an HIV/AIDS outreach training program; and Arts for Change.

Katt was in South Africa last year on a fact-finding trip as part of Project South Africa, a theatre/literacy project in development with theatre artists, literacy advocates, and staff at the Tembaletu Community Centre in Pietermaritzburg.

She’s received grants from Art Matters, Inc., The Jewish Foundation for Education of Women, The Lotta Crabtree Theatrical Fund and Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Katt is an affiliate artist of the New Georges Theatre Company, an auditor for the New York State Council on the Arts Theatre Program and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Katt’s most recent play, Dark Lantern, was produced in January/February 1999 by the Six Figures Theater Company in New York at the Arclight Theatre; the play was also part of NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing’s New Play series. Her work has been seen in New York at Dixon Place, HERE, St. Mark’s in the Bowery, Women’s Interart, BACA Downtown and the Circle Rep Lab.

Katt is working on a master of fine arts (M.F.A.) degree in creative writing from Goddard College, where she met Bradford Little Theatre Vice President Chris Mackowski, the director of tonight’s reading.
 

Epilogue by Chris Merry

Excavation is the careful weaving of two stories, the story of a nineteenth-century woman’s search for her father, whose brain was injured in a railroad accident, and the story of a twentieth-century woman whose brain has been ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease. But on a deeper level, it is a fresh exploration of an age-old question: "What does it mean to be human?"

Since Rene Descartes pronounced "I think; therefore, I am," men and women have struggled to understand the relationship between the brain and the mind and the soul. Modern science and technology have only made the question more difficult. Is the essence of who we are simply a function of the brain’s activity, the firing of neurons and synapses? Are we "nothing more than our frontal lobes, nothing more than our brains" as the Professor suggests?  Can the essence of humanity be mapped and analyzed in a purely scientific way, and are there moral implications to this study, as the Male Scientist suggests?  Are we more than what we do; is our essence, and worth, simply what we are able to accomplish or produce?  Are we, as the man maintains, what we do: "I do. I do. I am what I f***ing do."

I realize I haven’t answered any questions, simply reposed those raised in the play. Maybe that’s because the Young Woman’s search for her father, and the Journal Keeper’s search for insight into her father, are our own. We continue to search for the meaning of what it is to be human.

Perhaps the poet, the artist, the storyteller, can help us. The Singer understood the Young Woman’s quest for understanding, her search for the soul. Perhaps the poets—and playwrights—of our own day can help us to understand our own souls and breathe new life into the search for what it means to be human.

(In the Photo: Lissard talks with BLT patrons Steve Hodges (left) and George Tiffany at the meet-the-author reception. Tiffany served as one of the models for the show's poster.)

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