Mark McCloughan and Toby Altman present a performance by Mark McCloughan of excerpts from Toby Altman's Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). Arcadia, Indiana is a mutant tragedy, a five act-sonnet sequence, staged in the trash-choked landscape of pastoral fantasy. It plays with narrative, labor, sexuality, and form, starting with a murder in an Indiana steel factory and ending with the Sphinx refusing all of Oedipus’ solutions to her riddles. This play is a Renaissance tragedy in contemporary drag, destabilizing literary boundaries to develop a poetics of trash, in which the repressed and discarded parts of (literary) history return to strangle their point of origin.  

Mark McCloughan is an artist and writer in New York City. He is one half of No Face Performance Group, a collaboration with Philadelphia-based Jaime Maseda. He is the author of No Harbor (L + S Press, 2014), and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Lines + Stars, decomP, and Sentinel Literary Quarterly.

Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, including recently Security Theater (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). His poems can or will be found in Crazyhorse, Jubliat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies. 

Megan Murtha has had her work performed at Classic Stage Company, The Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, The Bushwick Starr, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and BAX. She is a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow and has been a Visiting Artist at Bucknell University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she led object theatre workshops. She is currently working on an evening of her original choral music sung by an all-female choir that will be presented May 31, June 1, and June 2 at Uncanny Valley in Williamsburg.

Justin Limoli is a Brooklyn based poet/playwright. He is a character and author of Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms.]