Shaking Hands with Demons: (Negotiations with The Tooth of Crime)

I didn’t pick this script. This script picked me. And it courted me for a very long time. And I resisted. I had been in preparation to work on The Tooth of Crime before I even knew that was going to be my thesis production. My second year of graduate school was spent researching the movement in the Lower East Side in the 1970s, reading the works of Patti Smith, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphene Mallarmé, and diving into the music of Sam Shepard’s hay days in New York City. Of course, I was doing all of this research with a new piece of work in mind. When Anne Bogart told me she would love to see my take on The Tooth of Crime, I was defiant at first. What took me two months to realize was that the show I had spent all of my time and research preparing to write already existed. Sam Shepard wrote it in 1972