Booby, Mama!

Booby, Mama is a one-act guerrilla theater script drafted in 1977 using the early twentieth-century surrealist methods for cutting up text and randomly putting the pieces together. The method elevated random chance to a major role in the creative process. Beat forerunner, the novelist William Burroughs, practiced this method to prominence. Hedwig Gorski began cutting up local newspapers in a Trenton attic along the New Jersey Delaware River after graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), the radical art school tucked away on the tip of the Canadian peninsula in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During that time period, performance art, personal videos, and installations began to dominate progressive aesthetics. Conceptual practices emphasized a mental aspect in these new artworks causing a revival of rebellious attitudes toward established art societies harkening the early twentieth-century avant-garde of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism. These combinations of influences along with Jerzy Grotowski's theater transformed her from a painter to an artist poet. Tensions in the script arise from the copious prescriptive stage directions treating actors as if they were pedestrian dancers in contrast to the declarations of miasma then liberty by the main characters. Directors and producers are invited to interpret her experimental masterpiece from 1977, which pays homage to Dada forerunner, nineteenth-century artist and playwright Alfred Jarry, by later twentieth-century women, men, and transsexual characters.