For The Sins I Can Remember

For The Sins I Can Remember by Vagabond Inventions

Inspired by Maimie Pinzer and her collection of letters, The Maimie Papers, mixed with stories from other prostitutes in the red light districts around the US, For the Sins I Can Remember is an absurdist portrait of women from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who chose to work as "soiled doves." Set in a purgatory cell where a prostitute squares off with two clownish Angels of Judgment, this tragi-comic farce investigates the social languages projected onto a woman’s body: the female body as commodity, as fantasy, as moral territory. The expressionistic narrative weaves the antics of the clownish Death Angels, Victorian etiquette lessons, and a vaudevillian brothel scene with painful questions of choice and morality. For the Sins captures a woman’s obstinate effort to survive her life—and death—with her personhood intact.

photo credit (previous & above): Sara Brown

Credits

Conceived/Directed by: Jennifer Sargent

Co-Written/Developed by: Donna Costello, Cynthia Polutanovich and Jennifer Sargent

​Performed by Donna Costello, Denni Dennis, Emily James, Elisa Matula

Devised by David Arkema, Lisa Clair, Donna Costello, Denni Dennis, Christine Giancatarino, Steven Hajar, Emily James, Elisa Matula, Peter Musante, Jennifer Sargent, Christopher Scheer, Mary Kate Schellhardt, Jennifer Stokes, Jessica Winograd

Music Composer/ Pianist: Tony Melone

Lighting Design by Derek Wright


Costume Consultant Veronica Russell

Performances: IRT, New York 2013 | New Orleans Fringe Festival, New Orleans 2014

PRESS

"For the Sins I Can Remember is remarkably timely. The performance explores factors of social equality using the proscribed gender rules of the late nineteenth-century to reflect a modern culture equally savage.” - Joey Rizzolo, New York Theatre Review