Michael O'Connor

Natural Objects Michael O'Connor

The beauty on the Northern California coast remains a manifest destiny. Everything surviving appears as a detour, but this is in fact an optical illusion. Ridges once full of forests and small out of the way towns are cleared by nature and stretching one's direction to the limit: does one look away or take this in as a still changing vista. Having seen it at a distance I can only rely on the first hand experiences of friends who witnessed it close up during a time when this region seemed like an island instead of the mainland. Just before turning my head I heard their comments strain, yet they told me in reassuring voices that this will eventually all grow back. Their examinations, and my far removed need to formulate my own opinion through theater, allows me to cast this idea of how a cold, very exposed and unfavorable coastline could be turned into a more denoted play. And so I become the playwright, and once more using what I could to assemble to build these voices into natural objects.