Playwright/performer/director Sibyl Kempson and performer/composer Mike Iveson are two of Downtown's ever-shining lights.  Sibyl has written, staged and acted in some brilliant plays; Potatoes of August being her most recent.  Mike has composed music for Sarah Michelson's dances, acted in three Elevator Repair Service plays, and partners Lucy Sexton in the humorous Factress shows.  I saw Crime or Emergency in an earlier version at Dixon Place and loved it, but in that production there were six or eight other actors; in this, it's only the two of them.  I spoke with Kempson and Iveson both before an early morning rehearsal.

Tom Murrin: Hi Sibyl, hi Mike.  So how is this going to work?

Sibyl Kempson: I'm playing eight characters and Mike is playing four.  And Mike plays the piano throughout the whole thing, the entire play.  It's like the old melodrama, with piano music underscoring the action.

TM:  What kind of music?

SK:  Mike has made beautiful arrangements of early Bruce Springsteen songs from his first four albums, before "Born in the U.S.A."

TM:  And you will sing them?

SK:  We both sing them.  We wanted to use his earlier work because it is less known.

TM:  Tell me about the play.

SK:  It's a play about violence and the way violence spreads among non-violent people.  Also, there's something about its structure; it has an unpredictable structure.

TM:  When I saw it before, it seemed to get crazier and crazier, and more wonderful too.  Doesn't it start in a hospital parking lot?

SK:  A hospital  exam goes potentially haywire and then it escalates, and it spreads to a river.

TM:  I recall a man and a woman in a boat.

SK:  There's not two characters anymore.  It's all just me.  And the boat crashes and we find out what happens from Mary Oliver, played by Mike, who is at the piano.

TM:  So who is Mary Oliver?

Mike Iveson: She's a lover of nature and a poetess.  She pulls together, against her will, all the strands of the play that have happened up to that point.  One of my favorite things about the play is that the structure seems accidental and organic, but it's very tightly written, in a deceptive way.  It's rock-solid, disguised as this thing that's falling apart, which I love.

TM:  Now is this where we have the cabaret part?

SK: After Mary Oliver, we get with the cabaret singer, which is me, and her assistant, Figgy, played by Mike, and my accompanist, also Mike.

MI: The whole play turns into watching Mike and Sibyl battle it out over the terms of the Bruce Springsteen music.  Suddenly Mike and Sibyl are using the Bruce Springsteen music to see who will destroy the other person first.

SK:  We're exploring the feminine energy in Bruce's more masculine music.

MI: We try to destroy each other, but we never know who's going to win.

TM: Well, if anybody can pull this off, it's you two.

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