Stray - A Meta-Memoir Performance

Stray is a meta-memoir based on creator Tanya Marquardt’s experience as a sixteen-year-old runaway and BDSM model, and a New York transplant writing about this earlier stage of her life.

A punk show with references to Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowitz, the show begins on November 1, 1992, the day Tanya runs away from home, and each song careens you through the chaotic years that follow – life with Tanya’s father, a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman, her first attraction to a girl and witnessing her self-cutting, being an underage virgin in a BDSM bar, a writing teacher’s praise, which saved her from suicide, and, how art sustained her throughout, poetically describing the pleasure of writing, “a left hand scuffing across the page like a club foot, or a piece of bread smeared in delicious sauce.”