My name is Tommy Vines. I’m an actor, writer, producer, and movement artist based in New York City. I’m the creator behind a new theatrical piece, “HOW TO PUT DOWN THE WEIGHT OF YOUR PAST,” and I need your help.

This new play is an excavation of the soul in the wake of things. Where I’m left. Where we’re all left in life. What we do with our time. What we mean to the world, what the world means to us. How we survive. How we get along. How we live today. So we can live tomorrow.

It’s an experimental, immersive look at the dynamic between past and future, person to person, heritage and love and loss and it asks what it truly means to be alive. It’s a two-person play, a one-act, with movement and monologue and audience participation and drinks and food.

It’s about me, and it’s absolutely not about me at all. Story-truth and happening-truth. I guess it’s about all of us, then.

But before we get there, let’s go back a little.

A few months ago, my family lost one of our central pillars, Frances “Bitsie” Clark, or as I knew her, Mama. My grandmother, our matriarch, my greatest role model. With her passing, the Library of Alexandria that contained our Family History, a Rich Life lived for Ninety-Three (almost Ninety-Four) years, Wisdom and Heart and Honor and Faith and Love, it burned down.

In the wake of Bitsie’s passing on to discover what lies beyond the veil, I don’t really know why, but I picked up the rough shapes of a play I’d left abandoned about a year or so prior. I finished it in two weeks. Maybe less. A flurry of finding text and writing and thinking about my own life and thinking about the Indomitable Bitsie Clark and Tim O’Brien's lovely and terribly haunting quote from his book, “The Things They Carried:”

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty…. I killed him. What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. "Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say, "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not." Or I can say, honestly, "Yes.""

I hadn’t wanted to write. I had tried writing about Bitsie and failed. And then suddenly I was writing out of nowhere. And I was thinking about story-truth and happening-truth and reality and dreams and the past and present and the future. What is to come for me, what is to come for all of us.

The play is not a reconstruction of Bitsie’s memory, but it is something she would probably love and support, delighted that I’d be creating on an Off-Off Broadway stage. She would be in the front row if she could. Maybe she will be. Maybe she always is, forever.

Here’s a blurb of the play:

Welcome to the strange, dangerous new self-help class, “HOW TO PUT DOWN THE WEIGHT OF YOUR PAST,” where a Nameless facilitator and their mysterious, administrative older foil, The Other One, guide the audience through a process of excavating the self so they can finally let go of what truly weighs us all down in life. But as the course goes off the rails, we begin to discover the sinister underbelly that lies beneath these two people’s lives.

I am the owner of a new production company called Breaking Motion LLC, an incubator for film, television, and theatrical work that breaks the mold and seeks to move boldly and viscerally, creating work unlike anything else on the market. This will be Breaking Motion’s second theatrical production and fourth artistic endeavor.

We’re partnering up with the American Mime Theatre, a home for experimental, physical theater in Manhattan that has opened their space up to us to put on this crazy piece for 12 performances across three weeks in New York City in late July and early August 2026.

We need $11,000 to bring this piece to life and complete a full, three-week run Off-Off Broadway. Can you help us get there?

Thank you so much for your support and your endless belief in me. I could not do any of this without any of you. I would have never made it this far without any of you. I would not be bold and audacious in my art-making without every single one of you.

And I would not dream and reach for the stars without you, Mama. Always.

Thank you for reading.

Love always,

Tommy Vines