Fran and Gus

In July of 2022, the BorderLight Festival produced “Fran and Gus,” a script that Cleo DeOrio and I co-wrote and performed. The festival took place in downtown Cleveland and included 45 performances, with 205 contributing artists representing 7 countries and 10 states. Big thrills came from co writing a script for the first time, performing with Cleo, delivering lines I helped write, and the fact that we spent the full show handcuffed together with only four days to rehearse the blocking, the dragging, a slap and a waltz and two lifts.

Cleo’s plane from California landed in Cleveland on Monday and our show opened on Thursday. We blocked it on day one, we added handcuffs on day two, we solidified everything on day three and on day four we added costumes. The best things in life happen when you and a friend are doing something that makes you both go, “Are you freaked out? Are you freaked out right now?” and that steady pop of weird fearless panic is my main memory from the four day blur. We were the directors, the prop masters and the stage managers of what was starting to feel more like a stunt than a play. Confidence was not what we had. We were running on that sense of young dumb honor that forbids the human heart from bailing halfway down the mountain.

We rehearsed at the Movement Project studio space in Fairview Park, a great spot that I had been renting earlier in the summer to run monologues. As a physical actor, Cleo is an idea fountain and a stone cold pro. Her time at Dell’Arte International and her serious performance resume gave her an eye for solutions and kept our stage pictures clear and simple and interesting. As a performer, all my tricks and powers are vocal, so Cleo really had to teach and reassure when it came to the dragging, the slap, the waltz and two lifts.

The dragging was easy, the puller grabbed the middle of the chain and the pulled would yank themselves forward. The slap was easy; the sight lines hid the fact that she never actually hit me. I love a waltz, and being handcuffed together only complicated a few spins and made everything prettier. The final lift was the most intimidating thing, I had to bend my knees and crouch while Cleo climbed up my back and used my hips kind of like stirrups and then sat on my left shoulder. Once she was on my shoulder, I had to stand back up to my full height. We had handcuffs and a chain hanging across us the whole time. Every time we did it, we sparked nervous murmurs from the crowd but we stood tall and never fell.

I wish I had more memory of that righteous, cool dare we pulled off. Cleo and I couldn’t even call each other to check in on how we felt about it until a week later, our heads were still spinning. When we did, we agreed that we felt disbelief and kidlike joy. From the early stages, we knew this couldn’t just be “the handcuff play.” We wanted the crowd to care about us as Fran and Gus and they had. They laughed at our jokes and rooted for us even when we were doomed. What really made us proud was the fact that even with no kiss and no “I love you,” anywhere in the script, the audience knew that these two were deeply together. That was our best accomplishment: that what we made felt true beside the tricks.