have just finished my fourth year as a theatre major at the University of Kentucky. Although acting is my first love, I have a great deal of interest in directing, costume design and playwriting. I am a member of the Honors Program and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. I have been awarded two Oswald Research and Creativity Grants for playwriting, one that funded my first full length play, The Noise in the Room: based on the diary of Carolyn Taylor . There have been three staged readings of my play at the University of Kentucky's Black Box theatre and The Downtown Arts Center. Currently, I am writing a screenplay based on Carolyn's story and eventually would like to write a play for each journal, making the 'The Noise' a three piece collection. My career goal is to open a theatre that specializes in installation art and performance theatre.This project has changed my perspective on the value of recoding my life and the lives of those around me. I think there is so much to be learned in the present through the personal record of one's daily activities and thoughts of the past. In this way, Carolyn's diaries have been a doorway, a threshold, of creativity and understanding. I would like to thank the Bracken County Historical Society members for giving me support while researching in Augusta. This play is not only about the past or the present, but how they intertwine and weave a new story.
When she was a little girl, Lauren Argo liked playing in her grandmother's closet. For hours, she could get lost indulging herself in the texture and look and sensibility of another time, measuring herself against the seams of an earlier era. She knew that she owed much to lives that preceded hers and she cherished those obligations. Once again, she is acknowledging a legacy to her forebears with this play that she has constructed from the words of a woman who died before she was born. For Lauren, history is not musty and old, better forgotten and discarded. It informs us today. It creates the texture we live. History is in our pores, but we who are alive now have the opportunity and the mandate to shape what we have inherited in line with contemporary fashion and demand.History is also a chronicle, and it was in the diaries of Carolyn Taylor, a woman who recorded her life for fifteen years, that Lauren Argo found a mirror of a past she wanted to explore. Early in the century, women in America struggled and waged a public battle to be noticed and to have options in their lives, not simply to be the voiceless appendages of men. Carolyn Taylor, a native of Augusta, Kentucky, was engaged in that fight on the circumscribed stage of the local. She devoted her energies to making positive changes happen in her milieu not just for herself but also for those who had less power and privilege than she.
Lauren Argo, who has benefited from the progress that Taylor and her sisters in suffrage demanded, pays tribute to Carolyn Taylor. She darns the frayed narrative of Taylor's life and in the process she celebrates this woman who could have been her great grandmother. From the fragile and fading pages of the first of three diaries that Taylor kept, Lauren Argo translates five years of Taylor's life to a drama that makes palpable how the fight of women for recognition and social acceptance at the beginning of the last century forms a continuum with the struggles of women and the underprivileged today.
It has been a pleasure to listen to Lauren develop her ideas and her approach to this material, which she felt bound to honor at the same time that she wanted to make it her own. Her job, as she saw it, was not just to set out on the discovery trail after the facts of Carolyn Taylor's life, but to add the tinge and resonance of today. She has succeeded, and in the process she has helped us see the shifting panorama and the fragility of life. How easily it can pass without a trace. The moments we live are evanescent. They vanish all too quickly. Art extends those moments, and drama is metaphorically a garment-filled closet that allows us to touch and breathe the aura and memory of the past while we rehearse the future.
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