Are you going to look back all your life?

We're loading in to the Downtown Arts Center. Photos coming soon. In the meantime, a snippet of text from the first scene of North.

ANNE
It is strange how utterly mad one's thoughts are.
And yet one goes right on leading a normal life,
hiding from people the depression or elation
you happen to be in.

ST EX
Hiding what you really are.

ANNE
No.
Playing as well you can the role you must play.

ST EX
And what role must you play?

ANNE
I should like to be a full-time Mother and a full-time Artist.
And a full time Wife-Companion.
And also a Charming Woman on the side.
And to be aware and record it all.
Oh. Something must go.
Several things probably.
The Charming Woman first.

ST EX
Your William James calls this a sickness.
Zerrissenheit.
Torn-to-pieces-hood.

ANNE
Yes! Torn to pieces.
But when I fly it's different.
Everything is different.
There is life, all my life,
below me.
Given back and placed in the palms of my hands
like a promise.

My children.
My home.
Charles.
All that I can never synthesize in daily living is somehow synthesized
here.

No tearing of the sinews.
Husband and child.
Stay and go.
Earth and heaven.
Mortality and eternity.

ST EX
On the night of my first flight, I was called to the field manager's room.
He said: "You leave tomorrow."
I stood motionless, waiting for him to dismiss me.
After a moment of silence he added:
"Navigating by compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well,
it is very dashing, but..."
And I was struck by the graphic image.
"But you want to remember that below that sea of clouds lies eternity."
And suddenly this viscous whiteness became
in my mind
the frontier between the real and the unreal
between the known and the unknowable.

ANNE steps out of the scene.
This next is partially to the audience, partially to him.

ANNE
It was very exciting.
Perhaps it was only because it was almost the first time anyone had talked to me
purely on my craft.
Not because I was a woman to be polite to,
to charm with superficials,
not because I was my father's daughter
or Charles's wife.
No.
Simply because of my book.
My mind.
My craft.
And someone who is a master of that craft,
who writes beautifully,
thinks that I know enough about my craft to want to compare notes about it.
To want to fence with my mind
steel against steel.

Pause.

Are you going to look back all your life
to an hour's conversation
with a stranger?

ST EX
Who could not even speak your language.
And you only haltingly his?