for context visit www.mickeefaust.com

My dissertation is concerned with performance and space.  How do people perform their identity and how does the presence of a stage signify a body is acceptable?  How does the performance of identities not welcome on traditional stages challenge our ideas of beauty and who gets to be looked upon?  How is physicality and knowledge of what constitutes a theatrical body challenged not only by those who can’t physically perform in standard theater, but deliberate decisions to use non-normative bodies- the fifty year old woman who plays a sorority sister, the fat graduate student who plays a lesbian hottie, the elderly man in a wheelchair who plays an army general.

in this  self professed weird theater for the weird community I feel at home…a freak among freaks.  a young rat among the old rat divas I love to sit and listen to stories about the company…tales that attest to the weirdness of this space.  The time deaf performer Terry Galloway missed her cues as the cast raced around the back of the stage trying to find her…calling her name in a panic…forgetting she couldn’t hear them.  Discovering her blissfully unaware, slowly putting on her Mickee Faust rat persona.  The story of a well respected professor in a Madonna sketch, dressed in leather crawling across stage to lap from a bowl of milk.  The days when the company operated out of a...