Lewis Forever: The Outtakes

On beginnings

Sarah: We first performed together really impromptu. Three days beforehand we decided to do something for one of Eric’s epic performance-parties.
George: That’s not even true. We performed together before that.
Sarah: Oh! I was curating an experimental lab series at [the English Theatre Berlin] where I’d been directing a couple of pieces. That’s true, but Isabel wasn’t there yet. It was you, Ligia and myself.
George: Sarah had a lab where she presented new works—
Sarah: —and not just confined to theater.
George: And I decided to have a music performance in the lobby. It was a really intense day. Sarah and I were working together on her show—she was directing a play and I was doing illustration for the show. She had me hanging from the ceiling in a hammock, tossing down drawings. We were rehearsing really intensely and then we had this showing at night.
Sarah: Actually, our grandmother had just passed away that day, and it was really emotional.
George: Sarah and Ligia were about to kill each other. I think they threw things at each other [Sarah convulses with laughter]. Right? Some change or a candlestick or something? Last minute, we kind of all decided to make the musical performance more than that.
Isabel: I’m just going to press into how we did this show. I had been on tour with Ann Liv Young and I had met them in Berlin after it ended. I think we had been talking about collaborating for awhile, but it was at the back of all of our minds. When we were forced to make this performance in three days, we made it in my sister’s kitchen, rehearsed all day, every day, and performed this little show.
Eric: They were amazing. They were the best act. They blew everyone away.

On background

George: Because of who we are and where we came from, the most power we have is that we can walk between two different worlds—or several different worlds—and we’re allowed to do that by society’s point of view. I think we’re showing that as well in this piece: going to the extremes of all of the stereotypes within ourselves of being very white and very black.
Isabel: And, really, neither of those experiences are true to the way we grew up, but we can pass.
George: Surely. There were times in school growing up where you played that card.
Isabel: Definitely. [Sarah laughs.]
Sarah: And I think also it led to us being as close as we are. We were all born in the Dominican Republic. We first moved to Miami, but Miami was just a little too crazy for my parents. We’d gotten robbed a couple of times and my mother had been mugged and it was just the last straw. So my father was really looking for the safest—
George: Whitest.
Sarah: [Laughs] —area possible. Yeah, and Sarasota/Venice came up and he got a job there as a guidance counselor.
Isabel: He also considered Houston, Texas. It scared the shit out of him.
Sarah: So he got a job in Florida and we moved there. It was funny adjusting in the beginning because they were so freaked out about the experience in Miami. At first, the house was really a sort of holding cell. They had a hard time letting us go out for long periods of time, just because they didn’t know the neighborhood; nothing was going to happen. Ira, 85, was not going to slip us some speed [Laughs].
George: I don’t remember feeling that paranoia.
Sarah: No, because you were still young. I definitely do. I remember coming home ten minutes late right after we moved and my parents totally freaked out. That changed over time.

On freaking the room

George: Maybe we should talk about the line that the piece travels on?
Isabel: Go for it.
George: We’ve landed in the space—it’s more like our death propels us into this space. It’s not that we’re thrown there by anyone or ourselves, it’s that the momentum of the icon burning out throws us there. When we land, we’re not stripped of our iconic selves. But in that impact we’re deflated, our language is strange, and we’re definitely broken or twisted in some way.
Sarah: We’re still playing with the idea that some want to leave and some want to stay. It’s sort of like a haven and a cell. We’re also playing with the idea that the space is a character; that these inanimate objects actually also have a personality and also have a force in keeping us there.
George: And throughout this piece there is tension that builds in certain words that charge the room; it flares up and tries to show its own personality in a way. We’re testing the limits, but we’re very careful as well and we’re all watching each other to see who slips up and lets the situation get out of control.
Isabel: All of this is barreling toward this moment where we finally deal with the imposter. In the beginning, it’s a little bit ambiguous. It’s obvious he’s not one of us but we’re dealing with him as though he is, and as it goes on there’s just more and more tension. It’s unclear who is really in charge and who is in control.

On the missing Ligia

Sarah: We allude to it. She will be incorporated into the show.
George: She is kind of the all-powerful spirit.
Sarah: The fairy godmother.
Eric: She’s the spine of the show in a way. The question of why she’s not there is one of the intentions, and her replacement, the imposter character, is one of the main issues to be unraveled. And she’s also always being talked about in rehearsals. She’s the ghostly spine of the whole thing. I don’t feel like I’m so much an outsider rehearsing with them because I feel close to all of them. But they definitely have their own norms that come out. The things that they all acknowledge as true and the ways that they create something—that, I don’t interfere with. I really enjoy watching it develop into a solid thing right in front of me. But I feel like a Lewis.
George: You should see him with a wig. He looks exactly like us. Isabel: I do remember when we first invited you to the project, you said something like, “It’s the perfect role for me.”
Eric: I do feel like I’ve been an imposter all my life.
George: What’s interesting as well is that Ligia is my twin and Eric is also a twin. [Happily] Now we’re twins.
Isabel: I found that really interesting about Eric: imposter as an identity. It seemed like such the right energy to bring into this group. We were not interested in finding someone that easily fit, who could pass as a Lewis. It was more interesting to have a counterpoint and for this person to also be inside of the process the whole time.

On what is on the other side of Freak the Room

George: [In a spooky voice] We don’t know.
Sarah: We still don’t know, but I think it’s also something about energy and also infusing a space with these things that sound so corny, but magic.
Isabel: Fantasy.
Sarah: We’re so into that. Please, don’t show me a mirror of reality anymore! Just take me somewhere. And at least for me, that is the biggest driving element of what’s on that other side.
George: We had a big discussion at one of our first rehearsals where we just sat around the table and talked and I expressed my own fear of actual death. Isabel had this phrase, “Dead is dead,” which the show was originally going to be called, and then we had this conversation where I said, “Fuck death. I don’t want to die and I don’t have to.” And that seems to be what is really going on with all of us. Dead is dead. We understand that reality very well, but we’re deciding to say that we will die and then we will definitely, no doubt about it, come back. [Laughter] That’s kind of our creed. Isabel: Live forever! Lewis forever!

On becoming artists

George: We had no choice.
Sarah: Our parents invested a lot of cultural capital in us early on. In Santo Domingo, we lived right across from the state theater and I remember being three-years old and going to the ballet, and dancing all the time in the house. Isabel and I made up dances at the ages of three and one; Isabel was crawling while dancing. Our parents really were supportive in terms of lessons.
Isabel: I do think there was also a trickle-down effect of influencing each other. You got interested in dance early. I was looking up to you. The twins were looking up to us, watching us make things. We were all just always playing and making things together.
George: I almost think out of boredom as well.
Sarah: We spent a lot of time [Laughs] alone.
George: Hanging out with each other.
Sarah: And we just came up with these games. We got lost in our universe for hours at a time.
George: The games just went on and on and what’s strange is that I feel like because our mother wasn’t raised in America—and I still don’t even know if she knows what Monopoly or any traditional American board game is—we really did create our own games. Isabel made up a million games for us to play. And every game had its own Lewis twist. Hide and seek was not hide and seek—it was hide and seek in the dark, in the pitch black, close the blinds, tape the windows. The ante was always taken up because we never played those games. We’d heard of them in school. We got friends later, but we didn’t have friends to play them with so we played them with each other. Maybe it had to do with being so bored and spiritually coming from a much more interesting place and being thrown into boredom, I believe that there is some kind of energy that just wouldn’t allow us to settle for just playing hide and seek. So Sarah was very imaginative and was always this queen, pretending and she had her minions and everything. I didn’t have any games. I was usually at the bottom of the totem pole. Ligia had a great imagination. She was the only one of us who could play all by herself. She could actually sit in a room for three hours and play teacher to fake students.
Isabel: Without pause. You’d walk through the room and it was as if you were invisible. And she was also the most reluctant artist, when you think about it. She was really good at math and science. The only one of us who was! And it wasn’t until her sophomore year of high school that she decided to transfer to the school that we had all gone to, which had a magnet program for the visual and performing arts. It was in her sophomore year that she transferred and decided to start dancing at 15 or 16. She was the one who was reluctant to identify in that way.
Sarah: I think Ligia always had a resistance to following along. It was sort of this thing of also establishing her own independence in the family, which is so understandable. “They’re all on in the arts—I’m going to do sports and math,” and we’re like, “What?” But, naturally, she came into it as well.
Isabel: Outside forces have drawn her away, but in a way it makes sense that she’s part of this in a different way.

On their parents watching Freak the Room

George: They want the Lewis Talent Show.
Sara: They want Georgie in pants with a silk shirt unbuttoned playing the saxophone.
Isabel: They want me in pink tights doing ballet.
Sarah: They want me in some sort of like royal costume, very Shakespearean, acting. They have their own very safe ideas.
George: They just came to see me do the Bill T. Jones piece, which was very theatrical and very much what they wanted to see and very much not what I wanted to be a part of, but somehow ended up doing. And of course after the show they were like, “You’re in the theater! Go audition for Broadway!” They have no idea. And what’s interesting, too, is that our father recently gained contact with an estranged daughter and son—though he hasn’t really talked to the son yet—from a prior marriage.
Sarah: They haven’t had contact for 30 years. It’s so weird. All of this happened at the same time. We got the show here in New York, they reestablished contact, and it’s like another Lewis from somewhere else is all of a sudden in the picture.George: She came here to the apartment and it’s crazy. She looks like us. She looks like our father. She was staring at me and I was staring at her and she said, “You look just like my brother.” They’re going to come see the show as well and it might be the first time that we meet our brother. Which is cool for me, because I need a brother. [Laughs] Isabel: I think the first week of shows is going to be a lot of Lewis family in there. But we talked a lot about literally allowing them to come to one show. Because it’s not for them. It’s in gratitude to them in letting us become the weirdos that we are.
George: If I had my way, they wouldn’t come.
Sarah: That’s horrible [Laughs].
.George: Only because—
Sarah: —of their expectations of what they want to see?
George: I don’t know. Not that I’m embarrassed by it or anything, but just having to deal with them being like, “Georgie, your glasses kept falling off. Why don’t we get you some new glasses?” That’ll happen.