Why do I give birth
to gods
and monsters?

Lou

a play for solo actress
by John Carter

She has drunk deeply of life, and she keeps on drinking. She is Lou Salomé. What matters tonight is her unquenchable passion. A recently dumped lover has just murdered himself. “My way has grown dark,” she says. “I come here for light.” With the audience as her witness, she peels back the layers of love and loss to the meaning and the beauty at their core. She conjures back to life her lost God, her lost loves, the lost companions of her soul, the geniuses Nietzsche and Rilke. She blows on the dying embers. Once more they glow.

In this fierce and passionate staging of John Carter’s lyrical script, actress Elena McGhee and director Tina Benko reincarnate Lou’s amazing spirit and set her loose. The theater has limited seating. You can’t escape her. You won’t forget her.


“Human life—indeed all life—is poetry. We are works of art,
but we are not the artist.” Lou Salomé
Lou appears as part of the New York Int’l Fringe Festival

Manhattan Theatre Source
(Fringe venue # 17)
177 MacDougal Street
New York, NY 10011
(bet. 8th St & Waverly Pl.)

SAT 8/20 @ 8:45
SUN 8/21 @ 2:00
TUE 8/23 @ 4:15
WED 8/24 @ 7:45
THUR 8/25 @ 7:00
SUN 8/28 @ NOON

Tickets go on sale July 22. For reservations call 866-468-7619 or go online.
Arrive early. Entry to the theater is via the stage, so latecomers cannot be seated.
The show runs 80 minutes.
Elena McGhee

Elena McGhee

solo actress

Off Broadway: Mirror Rep, Shanghai Gesture (Mme De Michot/ Creekside Mary), Dir: Robert Kalfin; Classic Stage Company, Fen (Val), also Candide, Cap & Bells, & Creditors; Classical Theatre Of Harlem, Funnyhouse Of A Negro (Landlady); QED @Hudson Guild: Scenes From An Execution: (Galactia) & Mad Forest (Irina): Ontological Hysterical: Lucky Man (Nurse); EST: Lion In The Streets: (Scarlett); Columbia Stages: One Flea Spare: (Darcy); Hanako Junction (Loie Fuller). Los Angeles: LA Women’s Shakespeare at The Odyssey Theater and most recently The Red Circle Theater with director Ed Sherin.

Boston: The New Rep, Worcester Foothills, The Nora Theater.

TV/ Film: Louie, Heights, Oral Fixation, Motion Sickness, Paradise, Get Famous & The Vanya Show.

Thank you to John for the gift of LOU.

“Elena McGhee gives a quietly smoldering performance as Freud's worshipful but wise sister-in-law Minna.” —Gothamist.com review of Where Three Roads Meet

“The director is blessed with the tiny McGhee. Her amused yaps of laughter are made for Barker; a man who knows that humor should never tickle, only slap.” —Time Out New York review of Scenes from an Execution		 Tina Benko

Tina Benko

director

Ms. Benko's recent theatre credits include Wallace Shawn’s Marie and Bruce at The New Group, The Little Foxes and Restoration at New York Theatre Workshop, Rough Sketch at 59East59th Street, Age of Iron at CSC as well as other Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, and television and film. She has been involved in workshops of new plays at NY Stage and Film, The Lark, New Dramatists, Red Bull, O’Neill Playwrights Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Clubbed Thumb, Women's Project, The Directors Company, The McCarter Theatre, 2nd Stage, Studio Dante, The Flea, Labyrinth, EDNA, and ArsNova. Directing credits include a workshop of her play Gazebo with Red Circle Theatre Company, Those Lies at CMU, the short film Tub, as well as projects for New York Film Academy and Fordham University.

Ken Terrell

producer

Ken Terrell (ACR) – is the Artistic Director of the Curan Repertory Company. He received his B.A. from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. and his M.A. from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. With Curan Rep, he also produces the Notes From The Underground Festival for original one-act plays. Previous directing credits include Love in the Bottom of the Ninth, Tooty Died Grinnin’, Much Ado About Nothing, All Men Are Whores, Jeb & Dash, Dog & Human, American Gothic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, J. B., Don’t Toy With Me, Poetic Escape, Scapino, and The Mission. He is very excited to be part of the company of Lou!!		 John Carter

John Carter

playwright

We know each other by the
glint of eye.

We know each other by the
ragged soul.
—from Thirst


Playwright and poet John Carter is a former merchant seaman, railroadman, and proposal writer who has ceased his wanderings and now lives out of sight with his wife and dogs. He has performed his poetry in various dives with the rock groups Eros and Luna and solo in more polite venues, including the Library of Congress. As an actor, he has played cop roles on stage and screen. Lou is the third of his plays to appear in New York. Life is rich.

Who was Lou?


Lou Salomé was born Luíza Gustavovna Salomé in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1861. She died in Gottingen, Germany, in 1937. In between, she lived an amazingly rich and remarkable life. She had two notable careers. The first was as an author whose work in her day had a profound effect, especially on young women who felt chained by the mores of the time and torn by the same drives toward freedom and love that tore Lou. The second was as the first woman psychoanalyst and as a thinker who challenged Freud and broadened his science. Yet her most enduring legacy was as a ‘serial muse’ whose passion, intellect, charm, truth and wisdom aroused powerful creative forces in the many brilliant men who fell in love with her.

She wrote, “We are works of art, but we are not the artist.” This is the focus of this play, her life as glowing art and her search to establish connection with the artist. She was aware of what she was doing. She wrote, “I can neither base my life on models nor make of my life a model for anyone; instead, I will most certainly fashion my life in my own way, whatever may come of it…. I represent no philosophy but something even more wonderful—something that resides within oneself and is warm and resounding life, something that is jubilant and wants out…”

So many things a person can call her, truth-seeker, iconoclast, libertine, blatant individual. It goes without saying that she became an historical icon for the feminist movement. Anaïs Nin spoke of Lou as “a women whose importance to the development of women is immeasurable. She created her own freedom. She had no guilt.” In spite of the many obstacles that dominated her era, no woman had ever so brilliantly invaded the intellectual domains of men, and no woman before her had flouted the confines of gender with such unruly will.

Lou fit no mold or ideology. She inspired feminism but had she lived later would have been a heretic feminist. It was part of her genius that, in a man’s world, she arranged things so as never to be at a disadvantage, and she did this simply by being herself. Men adored her, and she delighted in men. She venerated Eros. She saw men and women as markedly different and saw the mating of those distinct creatures, in mind, spirit and flesh, as holy work. She courted the divine madness of being in love. She wrote, “A human being in love, in that exalted state of spirit and soul, remains a priest in his robes with only a dim idea of what he’s celebrating.” She liked that.

Finally, Lou was a person of great spiritual substance. Her childhood glowed with the glory of God, then that God departed. The wound shaped her life, and she brought forth richness from it. Her passion was fierce and her will intense. She focused them both to bring light from darkness and meaning from despair. She held in her hands God’s dying embers, and she breathed on them and once more made them glow.

Lou Salomé was one of those remarkable and precious humans who alter our culture, for better or for worse. The writer Barbara Kraft called the first “modern women”. She profoundly altered prevailing nineteenth-century concepts and inspired its most radical agents of change. She was one of a kind.