"Dreadful Sorry, Guys" is a monodrama with music, performed by Claudia Stevens, pianist, actor, and vocalist. The text and original music is by Claudia Stevens, with additional musical excerpts by Debussy ("Syrinx"), Brahms (from Piano Concerto no. 1) and additional text by E. E. Cummings, "N(O)W" used by permission.
"Dreadful Sorry, Guys" was conceived and written by Claudia Stevens in 2001 for her own, one-person performance. Impetus for its development came with the murder on July, 1999 of her friend, Gary Matson, and his partner Winfield Mowder near Redding, California, a hate crime perpetrated by members of the World Church of the Creator. Departing from this act, the piece goes on to explore the universal human impulse to destroy those different from ourselves and the attempt to make amends afterwards, expressing collective guilt when it is too late. It speaks also to the emptiness and loneliness of a world without diversity.
"Dreadful Sorry, Guys" originally was published as "I, My Man, Only and Doll" in the online journal, "Exquisite Corpse," fall-winter, 2001. Claudia Stevens acknowledges with gratitude the encouragement of poet Andrei Codrescu and the excellent documentary history of Ishi, the last of the Yahi people by Heizer and Kroeber. All accounts in the piece are factual.
Claudia Stevens is one of the most innovative and noteworthy interdisciplinary performing artists before the public. She has created a unique body of works, several of which have been produced by Public Television and National Public Radio. Since 2001 Stevens' engagements in performance of original works include the Baltimore Theater Project, the Sandglass Theater in Vermont, the "Fast Forward Series" of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and venues in New York, Houston, Wichita, Louisville, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta and Fort Worth. Her university and college engagements include Bucknell, Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan, Drake, Lafayette, the universities of Mississippi, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and many others. She has received grants from the International Theater Institute, the MacDowell Colony, twelve touring and project grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and a N.E.A. "New Forms" grant, among others. Claudia Stevens holds degrees in music from Vassar College, the University of California at Berkeley, and a D.M.A. from Boston University. She is Associate Professor of Music at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.