Introduction by Guy Zimmerman
Cover art by Julie Thi Underhill
Book 2 of 5, TrenchArt Casements Series
Drama | $15.00
ISBN: 0-9766371-7-0
Size: 9.25 X 4.25
Pages: 67
Binding: Paper

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Boyd’s signature style, her love of ellipses, comes from a distrust of language and a rejection of the hierarchies it brings in tow,” writes playwright and director Guy Zimmerman in his Introduction to in the plain turn of the body make a sentence: Two Plays by Sissy Boyd. In “Green Shoes,” a dancer returns to the studio of an artist to reclaim his obsessive drawings of her. “Then. The body” portrays the sadness and tragic memory loss of Ma, an aging dancer, reviewing before rehearsal with her adult daughter. In spare language taut as a contracted muscle, dancer Sissy Boyd writes body as mind and mind as movement, on the broken edge of human will and desire.

Sissy Boyd is featured in Fearless Women: Midlife Portraits.

Praise for Boyd

“Sissy Boyd’s two plays represent something rather unusual in today’s theatre, a serious sensibility that is married to a serious investigation of form and technique. The delicacy and spirit of this writing is evident in each scene and on each page; a luminous and exact sense of how theatre actually works in three dimensional space.”

-John Steppling

 “Sissy Boyd has an incorrigible imagination. She choreographs provocative theater that handsomely leaches poetry and dance to spellbinding drama. Her new short plays—’Green Shoes’ and ‘Then. The body’—ensnare, incite, never console; are brassy and dark as a flugelhorn.”

—Alison Leslie Gold

“Sissy Boyd’s writing lives in the stumble, where language breaks, where intention is foiled. As the characters in her plays grope for a forgotten poise, Ms. Boyd reveals the dignity possible in the ever-humbling struggles of a modern life.”

—Wesley Walker

“One can easily detect the influence of Martha Graham’s tutelage on playwright Sissy Boyd’s hauntingly lyrical dreamscape….Boyd’s elliptical melding of episodes keeps us in temporal vertigo, creating moving and droll moments.”

-LA Weekly

“[Boyd’s] unique perspective nurtures a physical language, complex and lyrical, one that we feel before we comprehend…When we listen to [Boyd’s] writing we find ourselves suddenly awake.”

-Sarah Koskoff