Part travelogue, part monologue, part one-man show plus band, call it what you want. Anthony Barilla is back with Apocalypse Town, a musical memoir of his life between Kosovo and Houston, which premieres at DiverseWorks Wednesday and runs through Sunday.

Barilla is most known as the director of Infernal Bridegroom Productions between 1998-2004, and his band The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose members include Chris Bakos, Wayne Barnhill, Kevin Blessington, Jeff Miller, Cathy Power and Kirk Suddreath, and, for this show, John Duboise.

Apocalypse Town was conceived during a residency in 2009 at the MacDowell Colony and another in 2010 with Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France. Barilla brings us in to the apocalyptic creative engine below.

Culturemap: You had a long, drawn out creative process with this piece. Was it a eureka moment when you realized that you had a performance piece on your hands?

Anthony Barilla: I think that the more significant moment probably occurred just before that, when I realized that the songs would be the things on which the story hung. I originally thought that the adaptations of the Kosovo songs that I was making were just more of the ongoing songwriting that I am always doing — just a part of my regular habit, and not necessarily related to anything else, and maybe it would become one of the many small side projects that I always have going on.

So finding out that this small idea—to adapt some local songs, and write my own songs related to them — was related to my larger idea was the real big discovery. But songs demand performance in a way that maybe other writing doesn't. So performance unfolded pretty naturally from there.

CM: So you had something big and performable on your hands. What was your next step?

AB: The songs all had lengthy footnotes that told an alternate storyline. And I imagined a video that also commented on the monologue, and an album, and so on. So I knew I needed a team to further develop these elements, and that team could only happen in Houston because of my relationships there.

And anyway, Houston is an artistic home for me, so the next step was to go home with it.

CM: I love that there's an element of a homecoming to it. We mostly know you as a musician and director. Now you are an actor, carrying the dramatic arc of a show. At some point you must have realized that it was a one-man show, and that you would be that one man. How daunting was that thought?

AB: Maybe the project was layered enough that I never had that much time to get too daunted. There were always enough challenges to keep my frightened mind occupied. I have four great assistant directors talking to me about the performance, but also the content and the writing itself, and they kept me writing and discovering, and the pleasure of the discoveries always outweigh any fears.

CM: Does the band keep you company up there? Seriously, knowing that you had kept a connection with your band must have been heartening. Were you keeping them up on your plans all along?

AB: Yes, these really are my favorite musicians, and I even wrote some lines and scenes that are specifically for individual members of that band. We also know each other so well musically that the musical conversation in rehearsal and performance is just very very easy: We lock in with one another so smoothly and comfortably, and just live in the song a bit. It's what any musician wants in a group.

CM: If you had to describe the genre of the music, and I know full well that won't be easy, what would you say?

AB: I have taken a very free hand at interpretation. Some bear almost no resemblance to the originals. And some are completely original, and only inspired by their Kosovo counterparts. So all the songs are—to some extent — the kind of things that I would write.

And that ends up being somewhere between rock, country, and folk. I have all the regular influences. I love form and structure in songs, and country music had a big impact on me that way. So I always think that I am writing a country song every time I write a song. But I know it doesn't really sound that way. The shortest answer to your question is probably just “rock 'n' roll.”

CM: From following your blog, I am reminded that rock 'n' roll is global. We forget that. And the music selections are such a reminder that we are far from home. Evoking a sense of place has always been thread on your work. Kosovo is not a simple place. Nor is Houston. How do both of those places factor into the story?

AB: Well, I am just one of those people that never feels exactly 100 percent at home in any one place. I love Houston and Mitrovica. But still, I don't think it's a completely unique thing to always feel a little bit like a stranger, looking around at the world and thinking, “This place is strange: I just don't get it.”

I mean, I have to say that to some degree, I always feel that way, and always have.

CM: You actually import the place through video. Can you talk about that element of the work?

AB: The performance contains some of my impressions on my imaginary Kosovo. Because, it's not about the real Kosovo. It's about the Kosovo that I have constructed in my head. And these impressions have coalesced into one sort of galaxy.

And I think the album is another galaxy, and the website has been becoming another one. And the video is another. They are all galaxies in the same universe, and so they share some space and some elements. But they look and move differently. And I always hoped that you would be able to appreciate one without needing to see another.

So Tim Thomson is developing a video that operates that way. It reflects, and sometimes even controls, things onstage. But often it is just spinning in its own way, too.

CM: Not many performance pieces come with a book. Yours does. Explain.

AB: This is an example of another galaxy. The book allowed me to include more things from the universe of my imaginary Kosovo without having to create a four day long marathon performance. It's largely the creation of Lindsay Kayser, who edited a lot of my writing and selected images, and also injected her own artistry into the book.

You can buy the album separately, but it also comes included in the book with a lot of writing about those songs. And the book also contains a second album that you can only hear if you buy the book. There are unrelated stories and lots of secret things in there that should just be revealed to people who read it.

We'll sell it in a very limited edition at the show. It's been a real pleasure to work on, because it's influenced the performance, and vice versa, and the layers of the piece just keep piling up, and for me that's kept it all rich and full of discoveries.

CM: Do you imagine that the audience will go home knowing more about Kosovo, Eastern European rock, Houston or you?

AB: “Knowing” is such a tricky word. I definitely think they will have some impressions about all those things, but they shouldn't think that their narrator is entirely reliable. Because I have very much focused on our impressions of those things, and not the real things at all. I'm a little more interested in how we imagine those things.

CM: What are your hopes for Apocalypse Town after the DiverseWorks run?

AB: It always seemed to me that it could go other places, because it involves a rock band and a simple portable set. It's excellent to do it in a great space like DiverseWorks. But I could also see doing it in a rock club, or other alternative venues.

So I'm really hoping to take it to other towns. The performance is about Kosovo, but it's about Houston too, and so it would be interesting to me to take both of those places to other places and see what happens.

A taste of the Imagery and music from Apocalypse Town. The footage was taken by a camera that Barilla mounted on his dashboard as he drove around Mitrovica. It contains images from both the Albanian and Serb sides of town. The video is part of the larger work Tim Thomson developed for the performance.

Hosenfefer, possibly the only punk band in Mitrovica, inspired much of Apocalypse Town.