Tarpley Long's Dark House play: inspired, in part, by the McMillan Sand Filtration site controversy

See this message from Bloomingdale resident Tarpley Long:

Bloomingdale resident, Tarpley Long, has written a play, Dark House, to be performed in Capital Fringe Festival, July 11-28, 2013.  Ticket sales begin tomorrow at 8 am on the Fringe website: capital fringe.org.  The play is written with permission of the literary estate of William Faulkner.  It is a modern version of Absalom, Absalom!  and was inspired, in part, by the McMillan Sand Filtration site controversy.  The complete story of how the play came to be written should be published on another on-line site later this week. Excerpts of particular interest to Bloomingdale residents are:

"As I set about cutting and pasting Faulkner's prose, in my head another story began to write itself.  Sutpen, who came to Mississippi in 1833, purchased 100 acres cheaply from local Indians and proceeded to build a mansion on it started to morph into a present day DC land developer.  As a resident of the Washington area since 1968, pieces of local history began to weave into a modern story line - the April, 1968, riots after the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the burning and looting in Shaw, Columbia Heights, U street, H street NE, the plight of these neighborhoods after 1968 and the redevelopment of these neighborhoods.

Two weeks later, I was running on North Capital Street by the 25 acre McMillan Sand Filtration site, closed to the public and surrounded by barbed wire for decades, and thought, "What this land needs is someone like Oprah or Warren Buffet to purchase it from the DC Government and convert it back to McMillan Park, a link in the "emerald necklace" invisioned by Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr.   McMillan Park became part of my story.  As I wrote, I made a time line of events, changing  Thomas Sutpen's birth to 1940 rather than 1807. The Faulkner estate guardian encouraged me to re-fresh the Absalom story of racism, classism, murder, suicide, miscegenation, incest, The American Dream etc.  How better to show Faulkner's continued relevance! 

Dark House is not a DC  "corridors of power" story.  It is about the "other" Washington - neighborhoods such as  Logan Circle, Shaw, Georgetown, Edgewood, Bloomingdale and Truxton Circle."

Dark House is presented as a part of the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, DC, non-profit Capital Fringe.