"Let's Get Lost"

"My trip to South America was a time in my life when I was getting more and more lost, but what I was left with turned out to be the most important things," said New York actor Eric Dean Scott.

"Ten years after my return to New York, Paul Bargetto challenged me to write something for the Undergroundzero Festival. I was going to do a beat poetry reading or something but it turned into this. I knew it was time to tell the story."

In Tales from Bordertown (Prologue), Scott adapted his experiences traveling through North and South America into a one-man storytelling event, what might best be described as an epic poem chronicling his adventurous, post-college life—The Odyssey in a beat-up van and a shabby t-shirt.

"The stories I tell are very specific, but in them, or rather, the communion that happens in the telling of them, I want to bring us to a more timeless, universal place. In order to do that, I try to get us lost. Lost in the story and the telling of it."

Though similar in scope to Homer's epic, in Bordertown Scott is less a legendary warrior than a Bob Dylan-loving hippie.

In one of P.S. 122's black box theaters, Scott is alone onstage for an hour and a half, sitting before a worn wooden table. He recounts journeys to Alaska, New Orleans, Peru, and the Amazon. Some of the time, he was accompanied by his rebellious cat, Troubles.

Along the way, he encountered an unusual mix of villains, including a soda machine, a corrupt Peruvian policeman, and a spent transmission, but nothing was able to hold him back from eventually finding what he was looking for.

Though the story is full of pain and confusion, Scott highlights the humor in it, showing how he used his experiences abroad to help him find home.

“I discovered on these journeys that ‘home is where the heart is’—that is, home is not a house or a even a patch of ground....home is a feeling, a connection to something, it's inside. We carry it with us. We had to get lost in order to find it.”

He admitted the act of telling the long, uninterrupted tale in front of an audience is draining. "It's not easy, that much I can tell you," Scott explained after the show. "But I want to the audience to get lost with me and show them how I found home."

Remaining performances of Tales from Bordertown (Prologue) are tonight (9:30 p.m.) and tomorrow night (9:30 p.m.) at Performance Space 122.

-- Michael Catania