Everyone Loves Dick

Overview

Dick Ripper left a sleepy trailer park in Lubbock, TX for a new life in Las Vegas. The rearview mirror was aglow with the bridges he burned as his foot stomped on the accelerator of his unregistered Ford LTD. Dick drove across the desert, keeping hydrated with an ever-warming case of Miller High Life, and a single bottle of water.

He ripped a tiny piece of the stuff from the tinfoil envelope and placed it under his tongue. The acid, he figured, was stronger and cheaper than coffee.  

Dick only had two cassette tapes to make the 13 hour trek. The fourth time through “Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits” is what caused his mind to finally crack. All the radio would give him on a consistent basis was religious talk and angry conservatives. The air conditioning stopped working somewhere around Albuquerque.

Everyone Loves Dick is a new performance piece by Ernest Hemmings about identity crisis, hubris, and the new American West.  A “modern Western” in one act.

About the Artist

Ernest Hemmings is an American writer and performance artist living and working in Las Vegas, NV. He was the founder and managing director of the Las Vegas Samuel Beckett Festival, the Artistic Director of S.E.A.T. (Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater), and was the writer and director of The Human Zoo (Cleveland, OH). 

He attended The School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, and Gannon University.  

As a performance artist, Hemmings blends absurdism, Commedia dell arte, mime, and film collage into content-heavy pieces (TSTMRKT, Nothing, MassAppeal) that are showcased at various theaters and performance spaces in Las Vegas, NV and across the country.

As a playwright, Hemmings’ work has been produced in theaters across the country. His plays range from displays of class warfare (The Proletariat) to epic musicals (Die, Motherfucker, Die!)

 

Credits