From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Parallel Marriages
This article concerns the 2019 stage work. For other conjugal narratives, see The Karman Marriage.
A two-performer stage duologue that interweaves the novel's frame narrative—the narrator's meeting and marriage to his redhead wife at a Street Fighter II arcade tournament in 2001 Newcastle—with the impossible love of Leif and Katita. Performers occupy a single diagonal of space, sometimes back-to-back, sometimes facing, never quite occupying the same moment.
The work opens in fluorescent arcade light: the wife's voice describes her tournament victory while Katita's voice recounts a surgery. As scenes progress, the two relationships become indistinguishable—the narrator's wife speaks Leif's lines; Leif speaks the narrator's stammering proposal. By the second half, performers finish each other's sentences, speak in unison, their love stories collapsed into one paradox.
The Wife / Katita (overlapping): You cannot do surgery without a tool and I had you and I had him and I had myself and we kept saying—— Act II, "The Intersection"
A single wire hangs between two reversed chairs, evoking The Rooftop and the Wire. Lighting design by ██ drifts from arcade neon (electric blue, hot pink) toward red-desert tones and back. The final moment suspends both performers with hands not quite touching, while sound design layers the sound of the earth rubbing against space—a recording looped backward—until the lights die.
The piece makes no attempt to resolve the glitch; instead it proposes the glitch *is* the relationship itself—the moment where two separate stories refuse to cohere, yet must. Audience response was famously divisive: some departed in standing ovation; others in silence. One critic noted the work's "deeply uncomfortable intimacy," as though watching something not meant to be witnessed [1].
See also
- C. W. Smith
- Street Fighter II
- Leif and Katita
- The Rooftop and the Wire
- On the unfinishable: recurrence and the outline form
References
- ↑ Publikation, Berlin theatre quarterly, ██ 2019.