City Garage presents the World Premiere of

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Stories by Aimee Bender

March 8 — May 5, 2002

Adapted & Directed by Frederíque Michel

Fugue
Wife	Maureen Byrnes
Husband	Bo Roberts

Call My Name
Narrator	Maureen Byrnes
Rich Girl	Victoria Coulson
Shy Man	Paul M. Rubenstein

Fell This Girl
Susie	Maia Brewton
Narrator	Maureen Byrnes
Businessman	Bo Roberts
Patrick	Paul M. Rubenstein
Belly Button Girl	Kathryn Sheer

The Girl In The Flammable Skirt
Father	Laurence Coven
Daughter	Ilana Gustafson

Production Staff
Set, Sound, Lighting, & Media Design	Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Assistant Director	Doria Valenzuela
Costume Design	Michele Gingembre
Light/Sound Operator	Katharina Lejona
Stage Manager	Jed Low
Videography	Ford Austin, Paul M. Rubenstein
Photography	Rick Pickman

Time: Now
Place: San Francisco

The play runs approximately 90 minutes
and is performed without an intermission.

About The Texts
    In the opening moments of the text of “Fugue,” selections of which tie together this production, a woman’s alienation emerges in a quiet sentence describing a dinner she’s prepared: “I made steak and green beans and homestyle potatoes and even clipped two red roses from the bush in the backyard; they stand in the vase between us which is clear so I can watch the stems drift in the water as he speaks.” The lone semicolon here serves as a tiny fishhook that sinks into the reader’s flesh, evoking the aching chasm between the reality of the woman’s life and the passion for which she hungers. One of the numerous mysteries and delights of Aimee Bender’s story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, resides in our being made to feel that our bodies, our skins, are as important to the reading process of this particular work as are our eyes and brain. Though never previously adapted to the stage, the material serves as a catalyst for rich, erotically charged imagery as powerful as Bender’s prose. It’s a body-centered aesthetic that by its very nature takes you deep within a character, deftly playing the music of the sexual hunger in order to reveal a full array of poetically expressed emotional and physical truths. As the author said in an interview with the online magazine Bold Type: “Everything a human experiences happens on the body. That’s enough setting for me.”
    For instance, the female narrator of “Fell This Girl” tells us volumes in a brief account of events at a party: “I am wearing a short skirt that flows, a shirt with a scoop neck and I am luscious. I meet a man at this party who… has shaggy red hair, and calluses on his fingers from construction, or guitar or golf.” The reader participates in the tactile drama of the characters in advance, adding texture to the experience of their inevitable conjoining.
    One of the less-familiar tracks of the Beach Boys’s 1966 Pet Sounds album (a work that, similar to Flammable Skirt, inhabits then subverts its form) contains the lyrics: “Don’t talk / Take my hand and listen to my heart.” It’s perhaps not too farfetched to liken a book of short stories to a pop album. If so, Bender’s debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, is like the mature work of a seasoned singer-songwriter, who knows just how densely (or sparsely) to pack a song for maximum emotional effect.
    We hope you enjoy the cuts we’ve selected.

About The Author
    Aimee Bender is a native of Los Angeles. She is the author of two books, An Invisible Sign of My Own, a novel, and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of short stories. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt was on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for nearly ten weeks, and was also a New York Times notable book of 1998. Her short fiction has been published in GQ, Granta, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Fence, and many other journals, and her books have been translated into six languages. She has also had a story featured on NPR’s  “This American Life.”