At the edge of the museum, the game show, the treasure hunt and the documentary impulse in current fiction, David Hancock's plays inhabit a borderland that's been called "post-performance art." Amplifying the aesthetic of naturalism to the extreme by immersing the audience in familiar yet unsettling, highly detailed environments, Hancock deploys Cagean principles meant to challenge the physics of his own inventions. Choice and intimacy in the social theatrical space give spectators the feeling they have stumbled upon a lost world. His latest work-in-progress, The Sisters of Eve, an interactive event about a New England town that has disappeared, is, in part, an inquiry into how traditional narrative governs the sense of the erotic.

"I write from the 1970s. I write from before contact lenses and cable television....I write from a long line of step-fathers, genius-cowards who taught me about Proust while driving to the town dump, and then disappeared from my life....I write from the last of the blue-collar intellectuals, merchant marines turned actors....I write from Ishmaels too frightened to go to sea....I write from Cape Cod, where I was raised....I write from an aristocratic poverty, of selling off the family silver to pay the mortgage....I write from the paradox of food stamps and D.A.R. plaques on the wall....I write from waking up every day in the here and now­in this desolate forsaken time­with nothing else to do but write plays. I write from folly. And on really good days, I write from Thelma & Louise, with Thelma standing on the cliff, watching me go over by myself."