EtC explores contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many, where “brand” displaces character, and the corporal and corporate intersect.
"Elsie" is here both a collection of tropes for femininity (her embodied history leaning heavily into illness and inadequacy when not floating on fantasies of power) and also a symptom of her country’s disease. Almost constantly laughing, she is—obviously—unreliable. But EtC blends persona into hyper-confessionalism to open a space for honesty—the hope is that the spectacle of this character exercising her fraught and limited freedoms in the context of cultural, social, and environmental disasters might provide a point of critique, allowing us to readjust the values shaping our experience, and to move toward ways of being in the world that might be wiser, kinder, more sane, and more real.