Unknown: A Play

by Alexis Clements

Nobody knows Sydney Anders. Nobody living anyway. Well, maybe one or two people, but they don't know her well. So nobody paid much attention when the boxes came into the Archives-seven to be exact, six full of journals and one of cassette tapes. But Sophie was there when the boxes came. She just turned 30 and has been volunteering at the Archives for two years now. Thea was also there. She's 15 and has been spending a lot of time at the Archives lately. Unknown follows Thea, Sophie, and a handful of characters who interact with them, as they flip through the pages of Sydney's life, discovering her story as they go about their business in a very idiosyncratic archive related to the lives of lesbians. Inspired by the 40-year-old Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, Ny, Unknown offers a portrait of a small community of lesbians spanning four generations. It asks how we come to know a person as something more than the role they play in our lives or the labels society applies to them.

98 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2014

About the author

Alexis Clements is a playwright and arts writer based in Brooklyn, NY. An alumna of the Women's Project Playwrights Lab, she has been awarded a Dramatists Guild of America fellowship, two Puffin Foundation Artist Grants, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and the Source Theatre's Washington Theatre Festival Literary Prize. She founded the multi-disciplinary arts project New Acquisition, and co-founded Private Commission, a queer writing group and publisher. Her creative work has been produced and published in both the US and the UK. Her plays and performances have been presented at venues such as Dixon Place (NY), Women's Project (NY), River-to-River Festival (NY), University Settlement (NY), Emerging Artists Theater (NY), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Riverside Theater (Iowa), the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (UK), and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. among others. She co-edited the two-volume anthology of plays, Out of Time & Place, which includes her performance piece, Conversation. Her articles, essays, and interviews have appeared in publications such as Salon, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, The L Magazine, Nature, Frontiers, In the Flesh, and Travel New England. She is a regular contributor, focused on art, performance, and the arts economy, to Hyperallergic. She has a M.Sc. in Philosophy & History of Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in Theater Studies from Emerson College.