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By Katt Lissard (Playwright-in-Residence) 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. |
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