We are the children of artists. Second generation artists. Artists from artists. This is a rare phenomenon and one that we don’t take lightly. In a world where it is increasingly difficult to raise a family inside of a theater, our parents did it. And now we want to continue the legacy. To make art that turns the focus back onto the family of origin. To make a beautiful and strange ouroboros of creativity and family and life. 

Families are ever-changing organisms. Small nuclear cultures that shift over time. We are in a moment as a family that is uniquely ideal for making this film. We are through the terror of a near death experience with our father. All the children are grown. Everyone has graciously consented to the remaking of our family story into a film narrative. We are at the cusp of starting our own families. This moment is a window. An opportunity that may never come again.

What happens when you mix art with family? It’s a risky endeavor and a strange kind of magic. Anyone who has ever done it knows how maddening and frightening  it feels. There are many risks; personal and familial. But for every possible negative effect, there is a twin hope. A hope that the art will change things for the better. That the art will celebrate and save an image of the family that inspires a future generation of artists. We are willing to bear the fear because we hold this hope out. Maybe our story can be a beautiful beacon of what is possible when you raise children together into adults who cherish the creative process, each other and life in all its dramatic beauty.

This short film is a new project, but it is not the beginning.

I grew up in a theater that my parents ran almost singlehandedly. They met as modern dancers in New York City and fell in love with performance and the creative process, in all its guts and glory. At first, Cocoon Theatre was just the two parents putting on puppet shows at kids' birthday parties. Eventually, they were wrangling sixty students in every summer show, and me and my siblings were the good little art soldiers involved in every part of the production.

"I wish I could go back and feel the beginning. I wish I could go back and be in that child body again. Looking out from the dark beauty of backstage. The nearly total darkness that magic requires."

People often ask me, "What was it like to be raised by artists?"

I think I will be spending the rest of my life trying to answer.

"The theater was with us wherever we were. Mom wrote the plays and Dad built the sets. I don't blame them for getting caught up in it. Nothing else in life seemed to be as good, as interesting, as ripe. So nothing else was important. It came from nothing and it was everything. And we, the kids, were their raw potential, their proof of concept, come to life."

After my last play at Cocoon, which I believe was number 56, I went off to college and promised myself I would never try to be an actress. But I still wanted to be close to the creative process. It's all I knew. To work and work and work, and talk about the process.

"We ended up re-using a lot of the props. Because once you spend that many all-nighters making papier-mache' rat masks, you might as well put a rat in every show. One year for Christmas, Dad thought it was a cool idea to give us old rat masks from past shows as gifts. He pulled the dusty cracked things out of the basement. I think he found it quite meta and clever. We left them at the house."

Now that all my siblings have grown up, and the theater has changed, I can't help but look back on what felt like its own complete life. The density of experience was so great, the amount of time we spent together, and the amount of time we didn't spend doing normal kid things.

"I'm not sure if we, the kids, understood the term "type-casting" or just had a vague sense that something was up. How did Mom pick which kid got what part? Why did some of us seem to get cast in similar parts year after year? Why did some parts hurt to play? Why did I feel a vague grief whenever I played a mother or wife character? Did I enjoy playing raunchy villains? How could I process the fact that my mother thought I was extra talented at playing evil witches?"

A few years ago, my sister and I started writing a memoir about it. Being a child that is forced to make art with your family, that you also live with, does not come without consequences. We thought the memoir would be complicated and wrought with resentment. But we were wrong. There was so much love.

"We put on shows in every multipurpose room we could get our dirty little hands on. I remember them all. The wall to wall carpet of the Rhinebeck VFW. The shiny metal transition strips bridging the carpet with the parquet wooden dance floor. We would roll around doing our animal warmups and occasionally snag our sweaters on the nails. The drop ceiling, the fluorescent lights. There is something sacred about making art in spaces not intended for it. Sometimes sad, sometimes sacred."

At some point in the early days of writing a memoir with my sister I got excited. I got very excited. And in that honeymoon excitement started floating the idea that we could make a movie of our childhoods. A movie of our lives. A movie about it all while we were also writing a book? A movie that could grow alongside the book? How would these two endeavors co-exist? How would they inform each other?

"The show could be a play. But it could also be a modern dance. Modern dance is perhaps the most unappealing art form. Mime and ventriloquism have had greater reception than modern dance. Modern dance is the easiest art form to hate. It is the hardest to love. It is nearly impossible to explain. And if you fall under its spell, you may never recover. It's the kind of thing you hate to watch and yet love to do. You know, one of those loves."

Dance was our parents' first love. So they taught us everything they knew. When we were little my mom taught us to dance. When we were teenagers my dad forced us to continue taking classes from him.

When we dance we can’t help but think of them. When we dance we can’t help but channel them. When we watch each other dance we say: you did that movement just like dad/mom. We say “movement” and not “move” like other people because dancers say “movement.”

"Four productions a year for our entire childhood, it became difficult to separate the fiction from all the truth. But eventually, it pushed so far in the other direction, until it seemed like there was only fiction left."

As time marched along, and our family grew apart, we had to grieve the life we all had together. We didn't want to. This short film is an attempt to celebrate the ways we keep coming back to each other, and what we still have.

This is a story based on my feelings around estrangement, and the cycles of closeness and distance within families. Siblinghood is a relationship that changes over time and geographical distance, but it is an undeniably close bond, unlike many others in life. This film is about my brother.

A character description:

"Sometimes it seemed like Noah wanted none of the theatrics, none of the drama our family insisted on, none of the suffering. But in a way he also chose romance, as did we all. After Noah’s last production with the parents theater, he quietly began his lifelong commitment to solo adventures of the highest idealistic order. He went to pilot school, went bungee jumping off the coast of Thailand, bought a motorcycle and rode it across the united states, got his scuba diving certificate, learned to sail. He hiked the Don Quixote trail and was often gone for long enough periods of time that we thought he would never come back. But he always did."

THE SETTING: The Hudson Valley in the heat of summer.

THE LOCATIONS:

Noah works at a kayak rental on the Hudson River.

Mixtures of the bucolic landscape and urban city environments. There will be a very intentional visual shift from day to night in this film, as Noah pulls himself out of his routine, and into something more unpredictable.

VISUAL REFERENCES:

Into the Wild (2007) / The Truman Show (1998) / Beau Travail (1999) / Mare of Easttown (2021)

Troye Sivan "Rush" / Waves (2021) / Aftersun (2022) / Euphoria S02 (2020)

Chet Faker and Flume "Drop the Game" / Endless Poetry (2016) / Gook (2017) / Possession (1981)

Be a part of the journey.

For years we have been laying the foundation for this moment. We began by writing the story of the theater. The writing of our family history with art shifted many things. It meant we called our mom and asked her to verify memories that were faded with time. It meant we talked to our siblings about the past. It meant when our father was in the hospital we filmed him and each other because everything felt precious, everything was a part of the story. 

Then there was a time of confusion, a creative crossroads. We didn’t know if the memoir was actually a movie or a TV series or just a book after all. We held auditions and wrote and rewrote whole sections. 

And then we had the kind of breakthrough that changes everything. I wrote the script for a short film that we could actually make. One that combined all the years of effort we had already put in, but simply. This is that project. 

Invest in art that builds upon itself. It doesn't end here.

In our wildest dreams this is the first of four films. One for each child in our family. One that follows each of us reckoning with the moment our family changed forever. One that ends with each of us dancing. If this funding surpasses our goal, we will keep going. We will make the next one. And the next one. We will submit them to festivals and no matter what happens; we will dance.

SUPPORT, DONATE, & SHARE.

We are looking to raise $7,500 for our short film. These funds will go to cast, crew, locations, props, hair & makeup, food, equipment, and post-production. Check out our Wish List to find more specific allocations for funds.

As you can tell, this is a very personal project, so any contributions would mean the world to us. We have been existing in the DIY, self-produced, handmade --and sometimes ravenous-- modes of art-making for as long as we can remember. Let's see what we can make together. Whether it be donations, giving our campaign a follow to boost visibility, or sharing this fundraiser campaign with friends, we appreciate it all. Thank you so so much. Now let's get this thing off the ground!

Link to share this campaign with friends and followers:

https://seedandspark.com/fund/punch-me-in-the-face