Poetry. Drama. "In Tysh's tough, visceral, lacerating text, we bear witness to a surreal poetry for the stage, reminiscent of Büchner, Artaud, Genet, and Heiner Müller. Klara K leads us on an unspeakable journey through the ravages of WWII, while bearing a child who will never know these immensely moving shards of stories except through her mother's anguished memories. NIGHT SCALES is a compassionate, devastating tale of death and survival by those who '...ate [the] bruises and drank the hurt in a long swallow,' and those who still '...hoard the pain, like a gift that flowers on a dry stalk'"—Charles Borkhuis. Cover by Christian Boltanski.
Author City: DETROIT, MI USA
Chris Tysh was born and raised in Paris, and studied American literature at the Sorbonne. She was naturalized as a citizen of the United States on July 4th, 1998. Her critical study, Allen Ginsberg, was published in Paris by Editions Seghers in the series "Poètes d'Aujourd'hui." She teaches writing and women's studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her books include NIGHT SCALES: A FABLE FOR KLARA K (United Artists Books, 2010), CLEAVAGE (Roof Books, 2004), CONTINUITY GIRL (United Artists Books, 2000), IN THE NAME (Past Tents Press, 1994), and COAT OF ARMS (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1992). Her Motor City drama, car men, a play in d, was staged at the Detroit Institute of Arts under the direction of Carla Harryman in 1996. She is a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts fellow.
Reviews and Other Links
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“Why turn memory into theater? With NIGHT SCALES: A FABLE FOR KLARA K, Chris Tysh threads devastating testimony and playful humor through the question of how we enact, with bodies, as performance, memory’s language. Does memory become gesture, dialogue, set design? Is it spoken alone or in the whole community? Using theater as an overarching challenge, how does memory become both song and costume, narrator and chorus, horrors and stage business equally? Developing voices we recognize and grow attached to, NIGHT SCALES moves us through events of the Holocaust seen in the hot and the cold, mundane songs and fragments of Russian, French and English. But how do we see horrors in language without staging them in real terms, even in our minds? The very best theater works both as play script and as mental mise-en-scène, concretizing the nominal world into bodies, actors, breathing. This is Tysh’s fundamental ‘rogue limit’ as she writes it, on the road which is the melancholy passage of history, where personal stories become an affecting and unforgettable public display.”
—Thalia Field