In May 2020, I sent an email to Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater about the inevitability of my Fall 2020 performance project being cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Brian wrote back and said, “my very strong instinct at this point (which is not an ultimatum - happy to discuss) is not to continue the wave of cancellations/postponements and rather start a conversation re how the project might live in the Fall, given current conditions.”

I was desperate to do something, as well as receive the money due from my commission and artist fee during a time of lost income, so this is what I came up with.

Forced to jettison my original project and unable to collaborate with anyone outside my household pod, I decided to move into The Chocolate Factory Theater and live quarantined in the performance space for two weeks to create a performance that no live audience will ever see. For those unfamiliar with the venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater is a small industrial building in Long Island City, Queens, NY with erratic heating, no kitchen, no shower. I packed an air mattress, a toaster oven, a cooler of frozen food, and an inflatable kiddie pool to bathe in. The staff was kicked out of the building and not allowed to enter while I lived there. Insulated in the theater, I searched for what this piece might be through the real-time performance of my newly relocated everyday life. My daily rehearsals and routines, and my evening hour-long, performed-to-no-one monologues became a staged documentary film, revealing the quiet anxiety of living in quarantine and the dormant violence of isolation.