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"The Caucasian Chalk Circle"
Composer/Performer - Berkeley Repertory Theater, 1994
"Spunk"
- Composer/Performer - New York Shakespeare
Festival, Crossroads Theater in New Jersey, The Royal Court in London,
Mark Taper Forum in LA, Berkeley and Seattle Repertory Theaters and the
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
"Lost Highway" - Peen, Mark Taper
Forum - LA
"The Legend of Lima Beane"
- Narrator, Ensemble Theater Project - Santa Barbara
"Peace Child "
Narrator and Street Man - Lobero Theater - Santa Barbara
"Touch the Names" --
Letters To The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
This production conceived by Randal Myler and Chic Street Man, with original
music by Chic Street Man is a compilation of actual letters, stories and
poems left behind at the memorial. Touch The Names had its world premiere
at The Cleveland Play House in the Spring in the year 2000. Chic was also
the Musical Director and performed his original songs.
The United States congress authorized the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in 1980 to honor those who gave their lives in our nation's longest
war. Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in the war zone, an estimated
300,000 were wounded, 75,000 of whom were permanently disabled. Approximately
1,300 individuals remain missing and unaccounted for. The primary section
of the memorial was designed by then-21-year-old Yale student, Maya Lin.
It consists of two angled black granite walls, rising slowly out of the
earth. Each wall is 246'8" long, its ends extending toward the Northeast
corners of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
What sets this monument apart is a tradition that no
one ever anticipated: every day hundreds of people leave behind notes,
souvenirs and memorial gifts to honor the dead. The first such token was
a Purple Heart, deposited into the wet cement when the wall's foundation
was being poured. A Naval officer who was still grieving his brother's
loss dropped the medal in the cement, then saluted, as construction workers
looked on.
Normally, items left as the base of a monument would
not qualify as "artifacts" until they are 50 years old. In the
case of these objects, now numbering in the tens of thousands, the government
has made an exception.
Now recognized as a sacred site and a round-the-clock
tourist destination, the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial remains the most
frequently visited memorial in the nation.
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