Last Night Goat Island Performed in my Dreams

The Lastmaker: Photo by Goat Island

What happens when you spend three consecutive nights in the company of a group like Goat Island, for the first two watching their last show and on the last attending their goodbye from which you must say goodbye for a time to make a call to say goodbye for a long time only to return to find that someone is saying goodbye from the stage to some who is dead and this fits so painfully perfectly that your heart aches, is shot through, then sings and you cry?

The answer is the title of this post: Last Night Goat Island Performed in my Dreams. I was treated to a special 10th performance and it is possible (more likely probable) that no one else, not even the company themselves will ever have imagined it. On the broad and shallow stage of a theatre in New York with an audience of less than 10 sitting and standing in the large chairless auditorium throughout the hour and a half that the pieces ran for, I watched 'Kiss of Tosca': a tragic opera as only Goat Island could perform it. So much is lost, haemorrhaged, between dreams and wakefulness that all that stays with me is the final processional death scene where the other performers carried the body of Litó Walkey across the stage, when somehow before the show has reached it's proper end the audience breaks down into questions: what does such and such mean? Why choose this character? I'm shocked and annoyed at them and their disrespect, but I assume to a certain extent that this is what audiences are like in New York. The company, only slightly taken aback, finish the show and then answer calmly, before Lin Hixson restores order and brings the night to a close. Applause. I wake up.