Mote is a meditation on the desire to disappear. The play depicts a fleeting yet life-altering friendship between a secretary-turned-fugutive and the desperatley lonely proprietor of a forgotten desert motel. Set in Arizona and California from 1959 onward, Mote appropriates its characters from Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal film Psycho, forging radical new paths for them, altering aspects of their personalities, accounting for things hidden in their past, broadening their place in history (with regards to the period’s nascent feminism, the Cold War, popular culture, etc.), examining their personal and sexual lives and ulitmately leading them toward utterly new destinies. Prompted by my own lifelong sense of identification with Marion Crane and my interest in repurposing an iconic text as a foudnation for exploring questions about desire, responsibility and vicarious experience, Mote is not an adaptation but, rather, an extrapolation.
"The notion of disappearance, the sheer relief of vanishing as one person to reappear in another life as a different person — 'I’m driving into a second chance' — is where Mote insinuates itself into the Psycho story. And the other characters are all about reinventing the self, too — all perhaps except the career detective Arbogast. He’s spent his 'whole life looking for clues' and he clings, against increasing odds, to his assertion that 'nobody walks so lightly their steps can’t be retraced. ...It’s clever and absorbing, and leaves a tingle along the back of your neck." - Liz Nicholls, The Edmonton Journal
Keywords: Mystery, queer, film, Psycho, detective, music
Running Time: 90 minutes
Number of Actors: 6
Musicians: 1
Suitable for School Productions: Students 16+
Maximum Number of Roles: 12
Minimum Number of Roles: 6
First Professional Production: Blarney Theatre, Edmonton
Mote appropriates some characters, situations and themes from the film Psycho; all dialogue is original.