By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinvents
as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are
definitions of the word “Gothic.” In this work, a string of financial,
maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley—referred to in this
production as Maery S.—to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which
takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall
in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by
charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.
Author Biography:
Sibyl
Kempson's plays have been presented in the United States, Germany,
and Norway. She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. in 2015
at the Martin E. Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’s
inaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at Abrons
Arts Center in NYC the same year. 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten
Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum of
American Art, began on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, and recurred on every
Solstice and Equinox through December 2018. Other recent projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and Sasquatch Rituals at
The Kitchen in NYC. Both premiered in 2018. Kempson is the recipient of a
2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American
Playwright at Mid-Career, for writers working indisputably at the highest level
of achievement, specifically honoring “her fine craft, intertextual approach,
and her body of work including Crime or Emergency and Let Us Now Praise Susan
Sontag.” She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow and
a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. With New York Theatre Workshop and director Sarah Benson, she received a 2013
Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Commission for Kyckling and Screaming (a
translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), a
2013-14 McKnight National Residency and Commission for a new play The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,
and a Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theater for its songs. Kempson is a New
Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a devised piece entitled From The Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach,
and a National Presenters Network Creation Fund Award for the same project. Her
second collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, I Understand Everything Better, received a Bessie
Award for Outstanding Production in 2015. Her work has been funded by the
Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary
Art, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, of which she is a fellow. With
Elevator Repair Service Theater Company, she received a MAP Fund grant for Fondly, Collette Richland at New York Theatre Workshop in 2015. She is a four-time Mondo Cane! commissionee at Dixon Place in NYC. As a performer Kempson toured
internationally with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, New York City Players and
Elevator Repair Service from 2000 – 2011.
