Sullivan got the idea of The Chittendens from an insurance logo in Arizona with the image of a lighthouse. For the characters who populate The Chittendens, however, there is no insurance; the actors who enact its drama are victims of the American economy as it is driven by economic competition, and security in the form of an insurance racquet. Between then (teens?) and now (the present?), the characters replay actions and emotions born of the difficulties of a ruthless economy as one actor intones “spare some change” and another invokes the numbers she has presumably crunched for the analysis of an insurance claim. The ruins of The Chittendens are the rubble from which our society has yet to find its way out, and so Sullivan displays the effects of the struggle as a struggle to overcome economic bad conscience in the forms of the bodily and mental traumas insurance industries inflict. The bodily struggle to assimilate an individual and collective imagination of the past which has not ceased to pass.

It was like sudden time in a world without time,
This world, this place, the street in which I was,
Without time: as that which is not has no time,
Is not, or is of what there was, is full
Of the silence before the armies, armies without
Either trumpets or drums, the commanders mute, the arms
On the ground, fixed fast in a profound defeat.

––Wallace Stevens, from “Martial Cadenza”

Malice dominates the history of Power and Progress. History is the record of winners. Documents were written by the Masters. But fright is formed by what we see not by what they say.

––Susan Howe, from “THERE ARE NOT LEAVES ENOUGH TO CROWN TO COVER TO CROWN TO COVER”


Triangle of Need continues Sullivan’s investigation of a Capitalist symptomology, as its players are driven by ruthless competition, deceit, and disaster. The elements which comprise the narratives of Triangle include an internet banking scheme, whereby the character Dr. Obi would “reappropriate” the funds of a Harold Bowen and his family who died “tragically” in a car accident (one of those e-mails we periodically get in our junk mail box); a set of orphaned children taken for “Neanderthals” and forced to breed on an estate in Miami; footage of an Olympic hopeful figure-skater; film stock from a bygone distributor; and a synthesis of poems after and including Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eulalie.”