I am the daughter of my psychoanalyst father. My mother is a social worker and a nurse. I tend to fall in love with actors, or at the very least, aspiring ones. Some patterns feel inescapable. Recently my lover asked me, “Do you have any problems?” I think this was a response to a kind of put-together-ness with which I move through the world. I replied, “I’m self-sacrificing. I often find myself dissolving into others. I have a hard time knowing what I want.” He replied, “You’re a woman.”

In the year preceding this performance, Lauren Bakst has been looking at her life as an object of study. This practice has inevitably transformed her life into a kind of fiction or theater, and it is this theater from which More Problems with Form emerges. Studying her own performances inside of pre-existing forms, in which she has at times played the roles of wife, woman, dancer, audience member, analysand, and many others, Lauren asks: when does performing, in life and on stage, make space for the unwieldy contradictions of living and desiring, and when does it hold things, like bodies, people, and ideologies, in place?

More Problems with Form presents the body of writing that this life-study has yielded in a performance that might be closer to a film-screening. Or is it a film-screening that is more like a performance? Oscillating between the live and the pre-recorded, Lauren moves her voice and her “I” around. The work includes many multiples of Lauren, sometimes played by herself and sometimes by others in a series of videos featuring her fellow group therapy members, her lover, and her mother.

More Problems with Form indulges in the dissolution and multiplication of the subject, bathes in the alienation that is part and parcel of all intimacy, and gets closer to the difficulty of knowing oneself. Its recursive nature insists on an act of contemplation that takes time.

Created and performed by Lauren Bakst, with on-screen performances by Tanner Cohen, Peter Vack, Chanterelle Ribes, Joe, Betsey Brown, Jess Barbagallo, and Mary Carmody. Text and videos by Lauren Bakst. Dramaturgy with Jess Barbagallo. Lighting Design by Madeline Best. Video Design by Keith Skretch. Associate Video Design by Katherine Teed-Arthur. Sound & Score by Isabel Barnes & Garrett Crosby. Sound Design by Ian Douglas Moore.