Salt & Pepper is a short play about a woman microwaving her food. Well, and maybe a few other things.
Rhodiola gets home after a long day at work, and her partner, Uridine, arrives– and after a demonstration of belligerence, Uridine is asked to leave. Afterwards, Rhodiola begins to microwave a frozen TV dinner, and a Greek chorus enters onto the stage to help Rhodiola uncover deeper truths about herself.
I wrote Salt & Pepper to tell a story of unbridled desire gaining trajectory, leading to self-empowerment– and as an exercise to highlight the marriage between art and science; more specifically, mathematics and dialogue.
Conversations use strings of words which echo the thoughts of their operators, and often a string of words can have an embedded meaning; in Salt & Pepper, I emphasize the latent patterns within language by transforming repetition into revelation. To accomplish this, I used Rhodiola’s Operation, named after the main character, as a device to repeat and rearrange sequences which results in a linguistic catalyst by which the main character may initiate change. Rhodiola’s Operation is a tool to bridge the rigid structures of logic, as used in dialogue, and the boundless creativity found in a sequence of words.
When spoken aloud on stage, the starting and ending places are always clear. The journey in-between is where the operation becomes entertaining & repetitive, acting as dialogic choreography– creating a dialogue that pulsates with rhythm, intention, and hidden depth. Language itself becomes the stage, and meaning steps out from behind the curtain.