As If In Sleep

“This I remember.  Some people want to put this out of their minds
and forget it.  I don’t want to forget it.  I don’t want it to take
the best of me, but I want to be there, because it happened.
This is the truth, you know.  History.”
-Cesar Chavez

“So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing
about love and the hunger for it… and then the
warmth and richness and the reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens
without my willing it, that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other, deeper needs for love and happiness.”
-MFK Fisher

The cities and neighbourhoods in which the research for the play was done include some of the most dangerous real estate in the United States: Oakland’s infamous “Murder 20s”, Providence Rhode Island’s South Side, and the open air drug-markets of downtown San Francisco. A steet outreach worker, shelter line staffer and rape-crisis counsellor, Mr. Barsky continues to work with youth populations that fall into the category of “extreme risk” including sex workers, intravenous drug-users and gang members.

“Tim Barsky’s radical one-man show. Magical, mystical. [He has] an intimate, conversational style with the audience, while highly rhythmic hip hop musical interludes add to the atmosphere. One story, for instance, about a 17 year old HIV-positive girl, whose highly infectious TB denies her the hugs she so desperately craves is particularly poignant and epitomises the humanity and compassion underlying the show.” Colin Shearman, The Stage