THE MAILBOX
at
4th Street & Prospect Park West
Brooklyn, New York
October 7 – November 2, 2020


Let’s not mourn our mailboxes
Maligned
As vessels of civic futility.
But make renewed use of them.
To sit together (at a distance)
And console one another. And those we love.
Posting letters from the edge.

THE CONSOLE is a site-specific performance developed for the month leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which worked to reanimate a much-maligned piece of public infrastructure – the post – and to induce unexpected modes of contingent connection. For the month leading up to the election, I erected a consolation booth at a mailbox adjacent to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. With paper, envelopes, stamps, hand sanitizer, and a 1940s typewriter, I invited passersby to sit with me (at a distance), to talk about (and often dance through) the grief and loss they were experiencing, and to craft and then mail an improvisatory and consolatory letter-performance to someone they thought could use a boost. The piece was profiled in The New York Times and subsequently by a broad array of local and international outlets including Barbara Fuchs’ Theatre of Lockdown (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2021) and The Kelly Clarkson Show on daytime TV.