Welcome to my blog..


"We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When I started this blog in 2011, I was in a time of transition in my life between many identities - that of Artistic Director of a company (Apocryphal Theatre) to independent writer/director/artist/teacher and also between family identity, as I discover a new family that my grandfather's name change at the request of his boss in WWII hid from view - a huge Hungarian-Slovak contingent I met in 2011. Please note in light of this the irony of the name of my recently-disbanded theatre company. This particular transition probably began in the one month period (Dec. 9, 2009-Jan. 7, 2010) in which I received a PhD, my 20 year old cat died on my father's birthday and then my father, who I barely knew, died too. I was with him when he died and nothing has been the same since. This blog is tracing the more conscious elements of this journey and attempt to fill in the blanks. I'm also writing a book about my grandmothers that features too. I'd be delighted if you joined me. (Please note if you are joining mid-route, that I assume knowledge of earlier posts in later posts, so it may be better to start at the beginning for the all singing, all dancing fun-fair ride.) In October 2011, I moved back NYC after living in London for 8 years and separated from my now ex-husband, which means unless you want your life upended entirely don't start a blog called Somewhere in Transition. In November 2011, I adopted a rescue cat named Ugo. He is lovely. As of January 2012, I began teaching an acting class at Hunter College, which is where one of my grandmothers received a scholarship to study acting, but her parents would not let her go. All things come round…I began to think it may be time to stop thinking of my life in transition when in June 2012 my stepfather Tom suddenly died. Now back in the U.S. for a bit, I notice, too, my writing is more overtly political, no longer concerned about being an expat opining about a country not my own. I moved to my own apartment in August 2012 and am a very happy resident of Inwood on the top tip of Manhattan where the skunks and the egrets roam in the last old growth forest on the island.

I am now transitioning into being married again with a new surname (Barclay-Morton). John is transitioning from Canada to NYC and as of June 2014 has a green card. So transition continues, but now from sad to happy, from loss to love...from a sense of alienation to a sense of being at home in the world.

As of September 2013 I started teaching writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham University, which I have discovered I love with an almost irrational passion. While was blessed for the opportunity, after four years of being an adjunct, the lack of pay combined with heavy work load stopped working, so have transferred this teaching passion to private workshops in NYC and working with writers one on one, which I adore. I will die a happy person if I never have to grade an assignment ever again. As of 2018, I also started leading writing retreats to my beloved Orkney Islands. If you ever want two weeks that will restore your soul and give you time and space to write, get in touch. I am leading two retreats this year in July and September.

I worked full time on the book thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign in May 2014 and completed it at two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Wisdom House in summer 2015. I have done some revisions and am shopping it around to agents and publishers now, along with a new book recently completed.

I now work full-time as a freelance writer, writing workshop leader, coach, editor and writing retreat leader. Contact me if you are interested in any of these services.

Not sure when transition ends, if it ever does. As the saying goes, the only difference between a sad ending and a happy ending is where you stop rolling the film.

For professional information, publications, etc., go to my linked in profile and website for Barclay Morton Editorial & Design. My Twitter account is @wilhelminapitfa. You can find me on Facebook under my full name Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. More about my grandmothers' book: The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani

In 2017, I launched a website Our Grandmothers, Our Selves, which has stories about many people's grandmothers. Please check it out. You can also contact me through that site.

In May, I directed my newest play, On the edge of/a cure, and have finally updated my publications list, which now includes an award-winning chapbook of my short-story White shoe lady, which you can find on the sidebar. I also have become a certified yoga instructor in the Kripalu lineage. What a year!

And FINALLY, I have created a website, which I hope you will visit, The Unadapted Ones. I will keep this blog site up, since it is a record of over 8 years of my life, but will eventually be blogging more at the website, so if you want to know what I am up to with my writing, teaching, retreats and so on, the site is the place to check (and to subscribe for updates). After eight years I realized, no, I'm never turning into One Thing. So The Unadapted Ones embraces the multiplicity that comprises whomever I am, which seems to always be shifting. That may in fact be reality for everyone, but will speak for myself here. So, do visit there and thanks for coming here, too. Glad to meet you on the journey...

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Review of Nils’ Fucked Up Day


First things first, the last FringeNYC performance of this amazing show is tomorrow (Monday) at 3:45pm.  So, go to the listing and buy your tickets now by clicking here: Nils' Fucked Up Day. 

Oh where to begin about all the things that are right with this show?

First, I suppose I need to wonder aloud why the last two pieces of theater I have seen and felt so excited about I almost bounced of the theater were from Eastern Block countries.  The last show was created by Belarus Free Theatre and was showing in London (see older July post for review).

I don’t have a real answer for that, but I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that both of these countries are on the knife edge of globalization, spent years prior to their violent introduction to rampant capitalism as nominally communist (though in fact more totalitarian) countries, and so see things perhaps more clearly.  In other words, they are not the slow boiled frogs like we are.  They’ve been tossed into the boiling water as live lobsters, so they know what’s happening to them.  We are all being boiled alive, but they can tell it hurts and it isn’t pretty like at all.

But to Nils’ Fucked Up Day and the extraordinary writer/director Peca Ştefan and the cast of very talented actors, led by Radu Iacoban as the eponymous Nils, who leads us through three ‘takes’ on his day.  His flatmates, family and friends are played by an excellent ensemble Cătălin Babliuc as friend Hans, Mădălina Ghiţescu as flatmate Heidi, Ilinca Maolache as flatmate Lola and Tudor Aaron Istador as uncle Pops.

When entering the theater, there is video playing run by VJ Cinty.  When I arrived, there was a video of George Carlin soliloquizing about the use of the word Fuck, followed by a cartoon, which was in the form of a language lesson about the versatility of the word Fuck as verb, adjective, noun, etc.  In the midst of this Nils appears, setting up the stage using small props from a plastic bag, including a phone, a gun and some other small items.  There is a plastic sheet covering the floor, which is made up of a patchwork of corporate logos, such as L’Oreal, Mercedes, Ikea, Doritos and the like.

The actor playing Nils (Iacoban) explains to us that we are to see this play that was originally in Romanian now in English and Romanian with surtitles.  He says that while this experience will be new for us, for them (the actors) it will just be difficult.  Iacoban was very good with the audience, able to handle incidental movement, latecomers and the like.  He made sure to make eye contact or close with everyone.  He had us laughing very quickly.

Take One of his day is Nils’ ‘fucked up’ day and was an extraordinary representation of total nihilism, which involved drug taking, brilliantly written idiotic rambling, references to pedophilia, meaningless sex, objectification of both men and women, and culminating in the killing of two people onstage, including Nils.  The slow boil went from kind of shocking to completely shocking, from funny to uncomfortably funny, to not funny at all.  And all of this in a mixture of English and Romanian with surtitles, which described the action and the ideas behind it in an overly literal or understated way rather than the actual words.  The effect was riveting, as it felt like it took the ironic, never-satisfied-consumerist stance and brought it to its logical, nihilistic conclusion. The playwright himself walks on periodically with one line: Suck my dick.  He is the usually unseen other flatmate who pays the rent and who Nils respects because he is a playwright.

The lights come back on after Nils himself is killed, he avers that this was not the best of days and suggests Take Two: Nils’ Seraphic Day.  The female flatmates who were lascivious lesbians earlier are dressed as schoolgirls.  Uncle Pops who was a drug addict is now a professor who ‘teaches’ the girls, which clearly implies pedophilia, but all are smiling throughout, looking geeky, well dressed and as if all is well, when it is clearly not.

At the end of this briefer sequence, Nils also gets killed by the nice little boy down the road who was delivering the pizza, but all the rest smile through it, walk over his corpse and go off to eat at a restaurant.

Take Three, which Nils suggests after the lights come up once again, is one of happiness.  He is alone on stage, now back in his suit, in which he entered before devolving into drug-addled Nils, and asks us to concentrate on him, that we sleep “in profound consciousness” and awaken as more creative beings who will understand one another and be better people.  He ends the show, as it began, with the statement “This is a show – a show of illusion.”  Is this a plea to become better people or a marketing ploy?  I would like to believe it was sincere, and I think it was, but still references the possibility of the eternally present advertising machine.

Throughout the show, video is used to extraordinarily good effect.  The images, words (including surtitles), continual ‘news feed’ that is predicting the end of the world within days (in the first section), and the use of video ‘blood’ for the violence was very effective.

This is mere description, and I cannot capture the event itself, but hope that this will lead you to go and see it.   Our fellow human beings from the former Eastern Block are seeing things quite clearly, and I think we best be listening, especially when there is an effort made to speak in English (the “language of globalization” as Nils explains). 

Finally, I should mention that Nils also says at the beginning to not worry, they will not emigrate so our bartending jobs are safe.  This is both funny and sad, because as all of us working in theater know, this is true, not only for immigrants but for most of us who work in the arts in NYC.  My suspicion, because I have been working in London and have worked some in Europe, is that this play probably received more funding than many of the other FringeNYC shows that were locally grown.  This is the great situational irony that never fades about downtown NYC theater.  Experimental artists are always economic immigrants.




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