The people who wrote me were not aware;

they didn’t know that everything would become a show.

I didn’t tell them they would be the protagonists,

the Dramatis Personae, who would act on stage through their thoughts,

their words, their images. The machinists, the sound technicians.

The scenographers.

From beginning to end it would be about them.

Together they would be part of a choir.

I choose not to tell them because I needed a strategy,

albeit an unorthodox one, to bring things out.

Not the usual ones, but the true ones.

Not Those Things you mention at the beginning of a phone call to a friend,

but rather the ones you hide.

Not Those Things you can simply leave out,

but rather the ones that come back.

Not Those Things you can explain clearly,

but rather the ones you lack words for.

I asked everyone to stop, to sit in one room of the house,

to darken the outside, to turn themselves inside out

and to behold that dark as well, stay in it, wait, don’t overthink,

and start writing. To write together this show about isolation.

For the past month I have collected sentences and thoughts connected to this moment that people have freely shared with me by email. Normally I use them as inspirational material for my daily practice of night drawings as part of a “Diary of the Isolation,” but I have started to conceive of these sentences as lines and descriptions from an imagined theatre piece. The boldface text is selected from this broader collection of emails.