ABSTRACT
The performance script “The United States of Lucia” is devised from an oral history project with a Haitian-American family about their ancestor Lucia. Its nine interconnected invocations simulate a novena: a rite of nine successive days of prayers and mourning to commemorate a family member’s death. The nine scenes emphasize how the author’s family stumbles through and recovers from its sense memories of their ancestor. The scenes also build upon theories of remembering as a performance steeped in the present that inherently reconfigures time, space, and ideals.
