This piece began as an assignment in Robert Woodruff's class at Columbia. He asked us to look at the non-theatrical work of Samuel Beckett — not the plays, but the prose — and to make theatre out of it. We could move between texts week to week, or commit to one piece for the entire semester. Murray Bartlett, Sevrin Mason, Jason Griffin, and designer Dan Stearns began working together on The Calmative, weaving in elements of the biography of Nancy Cunard as the semester progressed.

What emerged was something none of us had quite made before.

The experience began in one room. The audience encountered the world of the piece — live performance and life-sized projection of that same live performance running simultaneously, creating an immediate sense of disorientation that mirrored Beckett's text. Then the group was led down a hallway into a second room, set up as a séance. While the séance unfolded, the hallway behind them was quietly transformed into a candlelit maze. The audience moved through it — led back toward where they had started by Murray — only to find that the original room had been completely reconfigured. Nothing was where they had left it.

The piece was designed to put the audience inside the experience of Beckett's narrator — that drifting, uncertain consciousness that cannot quite locate itself in time or space, that tells itself stories to stay calm, that moves through a world that keeps shifting beneath its feet. The live projection doubled and ghosted the performers, adding another layer of unreality. You could never be entirely sure what was happening in front of you and what was its echo.

It was site-specific, immersive, and deeply strange. It remains one of the most formally adventurous things I have made. Murray Bartlett, who led the audience back through the candlelit maze in the piece's final movement, has since become widely known for his work in The White Lotus and The Last of Us.