Plays & Performances, Writing

Pieces

Why

There’s a photo that the British artist Richard Billingham took of his mother, Ray’s A Laugh. She sitting on a dingy couch, smoking a cigarette, drinking a drink, and patiently, quietly, fitting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Inspired by this photo and my own love of puzzles, I developed this play to explore the way we use the metaphor of a jigsaw to piece together parts of our lives that are sometimes difficult to understand.

What

Characters: 1 female
Running Time: 15 minutes
Summary: This play entreats the audience to help a woman solve two puzzles—the jigsaw laid out before her and another in her life that has long remained unsolved.

When & Where

Availability: Available for performance.
Production History:
• Produced by Riverside Theater, part of Walking the Wire, Iowa City, Iowa, Sept. 2006
• Public reading, 4th Annual John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Page-to-Stage Festival, Washington, DC, Sept. 2005


Publication

This play was published in issue #8 (Nov. 2007) of KNOCK, a literary magazine based in Seattle.


By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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