Choreographer turns Sam Shepard's incest play into dance in an Ace Hotel room

Choreographer Mamie Green is staging fools, a dance-theater piece based partly on Sam Shepard’s 1983 play Fool for Love, in the Loft Suite at Ace Hotel New York.

“They are both incest plays,” Green said of Shepard’s play and her version.

In Shepard’s play, former lovers reunite at a Mojave Desert motel before the audience learns that they are half-siblings. Their father, known as the Old Man, appears throughout the play.

Green’s version replaces the original heterosexual couple with two brothers, while a young woman, Sadie Rose Parker, plays the Old Man. It also makes the incest explicit from the beginning.

“You can tell everyone that I am your brother,” dancers Wendell Gray II and Gary Reagan repeat back and forth as their bodies twist in and around each other at the start of the show.

The brothers’ characters are also drawn in part from Blood Brother, a poetry collection by Los Angeles writer Lily Lady, who wrote the script for fools.

“Lily and I talked about using that as inspiration for our version and playing with gender and our ideas of masculinity,” Green said.

Shepard’s play is set in a motel room in the Mojave Desert. Green, who is the hotel’s artist-in-residence for September, said she picked it for that reason.

“I chose that play like knowing that I was going to do something in a hotel room,” Green told Urgent Matter after the 8 p.m. show on Wednesday.

Audience members check in downstairs to get a room key. I accidentally checked in for a different event at the hotel: a Family Offices for Sustainable Development soirée.

I crammed into the elevator with a few other people, including bag-carrying guests of the hotel. Once we reached the eighth floor, I saw a couple of people outside room 811 looking at their keycards and deciding whether to enter. I was the first in our group to try the door.

Green told us the room wasn’t ready yet. There had been a “miscommunication with staff downstairs.” But the plan is for audience members to let themselves in with the key card.

“Ideally, yes,” Green said. “You walk in, and you’re transported once you enter this room.”

When I walked in, the two male performers sat on the bed while Parker leaned against a dresser in a white wife-beater, drinking what looked like wine and picking her nails. The scene reminded me of a Nan Goldin photograph come to life.

“So our version is abstract. My medium is dance, but I love to use text,” Green said. “I’m less interested in what happened and more interested in what questions are being asked through movement and through text.”

Green said she imagines the characters in a cowboy bar in the middle of the American West, “trapped in this scene forever.”

“It starts and ends the same way,” Green said.

I’ve never been to a dance performance this small. You can hear the dancers’ feet on the floor. Green said she chose Shepard’s play for that intimacy.

“It’s like, you know, family is claustrophobic, relationships can be claustrophobic,” Green said.

Green said the set is meant to wrap the audience “in some kind of bizarre blanket.”

The production design collective Future Space NYC designed the set, with lighting by Henry Mont. Green said she wanted to transform the hotel room into “a liminal space that has no beginning and end.”

“The bed is obscured and everything becomes like this endless void,” Green said.

The largest prop is a rope. In Shepard’s play, the male lover always carries a lasso, Green said, a nod to the mythos of the cowboy.

In the show, the rope ties performers to each other as they use it to yank each other on and off the bed and around the room.

“What does it mean to be physically tethered to another body?” Green said. “There’s a metaphor and also a physical constraint in that.”

Parker said she met Green on Sugar Tub, a play in Los Angeles written by Sienna Foster-Soltis about models at a pool party and the gatekeepers of the industry. Green choreographed it.

“It was set in a pool but staged in an abandoned bank vault. It was disgusting and dingy, but we were all wearing tap shoes,” Parker said.

The new piece was a different assignment.

“This was way out of my comfort zone, but especially playing an old man,” Parker said.

Parker said her grandfather is from Texas. She built the character from the men in her family.

“I was loosely basing it off of my dad and the male Texans of my family, and not just the accent, but the cadence, and the quality at which they move, and how they present their masculinity,” Parker said.

She also studied Texas dialects and watched the film version of Fool for Love. She used Harry Dean Stanton, who played the Old Man, as a reference because “he wasn’t a hyper-masculine kind of figure.”

Parker, who works at an art gallery, also said she drew on performance art, including the work of Anne Imhof.

“Watching people use their bodies, and seeing how simple gestures are read, and create such an emotional world, was really helpful,” Parker said.

“For me, someone who’s not a dancer, and doesn’t have a background in movement, it’s hard to think what I’m doing is interesting.”

I wouldn’t have guessed Parker wasn’t a dancer.

Green said she always works with both actors and dancers.

“I just think they bring something totally different to it, and then also pushing the dancers to speak, and then Sadie to dance,” Green said.

Gray said the story drew him in.

“It’s definitely a little, what’s the word, eerie in a way, but maybe that pulled me towards it,” Gray said.

He said the size of the room suits him.

“Maybe I’m naturally softer spoken, which works well in a room like this,” Gray said. “Maybe it’s scary, but it’s intimate.”

Asked what he wants the audience to feel, Gray said he wants them to see “that I’m expressing myself through my body, but also I could be someone they pass on the street, on the subway.”

Gray said many guests at the hotel likely don’t know the show is happening.

“It’s cool that it’s kind of hidden within the fabric of like a hotel,” Gray said.

After shows, the performers walk out past guests carrying luggage.

“If I’m alone, I’ll just blend in. I act like I’m a resident there and then go into the city,” Gray said. “You’re a really big thing, then you get on the subway and you’re just like everybody else.”

Green is from Seattle and lives in Los Angeles. She said she came to New York for the project.

“I never knew I would get deep into cowboys,” Green said.

“Even though he kind of presents as this like masculine, handsome, cowboy, Marlboro man vibe, it’s like he actually is like a total weirdo underneath,” Green said of Shepard. “And I think that’s what is interesting about his work is that contrast.”

By the time I finished my interviews, the crew had already stripped much of the set down. The piece has one night left with performances at 6 and 8 p.m. on September 30.

Urgent Matter is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to support independent arts journalism.