I feel like I can imagine being a gravedigger but I find it harder to imagine having a thirty year gravedigging career. I mean – almost every day – for thirty years, you are surrounded by earth and death and of course a skull is just a normal part of the job after thirty years of running into them.
Thirty years is a long time to do anything. They only thing I have been doing that long is theatre – and that’s my calling…but is gravedigging a calling? If so – what kind of person is called to it?

In case you forgot where we’re supposed to be, it’s Denmark.
This play takes place in Denmark.
Where are we again? Denmark. Yep.

It would be a funny world if losing your wits was like losing your keys or your wallet. Like, you just temporarily misplace them – you look around and search in all the usual places and the places they absolutely shouldn’t be but you search there anyway, just in case. “Oh, man, they were just here! I feel like I just had my wits and then …where could they be? I had them in my hand and – what did I get distracted and put them down in a silly place?”

Then when you find them, you forget the panic you felt for the short time you were without them.

It is the strange that stands out.
And the strange that makes a good story.
It is the strange that we remember.
And the stranger that unites disparate people.
But so many people will tie themselves into knots to NOT be strange. They will hide their humanity, bury their quirks, push aside their idiosyncrasies just to NOT be strange.

If everyone is mad, then is it really madness or just the way things are? If, say, everyone in Minnesota heard voices – and were basically schizophrenic…are they really mad? And would a state of schizophrenic people find ways to manage their idiosyncrasies? If you were schizophrenic it might be really comforting to go to a place where everyone shared your illness. Perhaps we might no longer even consider it an illness but just the Minnesotan way of doing things.

Context really is everything. The place I went to college was full of individualists, non-conformists and freaks. The out of the ordinary was the norm. It wasn’t the goths all in black that stood out. No. Where I went to college, there was a guy who wore a jacket and tie fairly regularly. If you were trying to tell someone else about him, you’d say, “You know, the Republican” and they’d nod and say, “Oh yeah. That guy.”
Turns out he wasn’t even a Republican, he just looked like one on our campus of freaks. If he’d gone to another school, he’d have fit right in, never made a wave, but at ours, absolutely everyone knew who he was.