Tag: review

I’d call this a spoiler alert but, technically, you can’t spoil this show. You can only alter the experience. That said, if you have tickets to see this show in the near future I’d probably read this afterwards.

Earlier this month I had tickets to see a show that had been brought in as part of BYU’s Off the Map theatre festival. Because the shows brought in are consistently fantastic I bought tickets months ago without really looking too closely at what the show was and forgot all about it. All I knew going into the show was that it was highly interactive. I didn’t know (nobody did) that afterwards the company member sitting next to me would tell me that in over 100 shows, this had never happened. The company member (Jax) had speculated on what might occur if it did but it had not, as yet, happened. Jax thought it would be magical and (spoiler alert?) it was.

Because I knew the audience would be a big part of the show I wasn’t surprised when my fellow audience members were called upon to be characters in the story or interact with the company members. Several were identified as this character or that character when Abby (the company member telling the story at that point) asked me to stand up and take a few steps into the playing space, which was a large rectangle made by the seated audience members. At this point, though, we were more than just audience members. We were not the discrete lumps of two or three that we were in the lobby as we waited to go in. We had taken our first tentative steps towards being a unit and the full attention and energy of 70 people were focused on that corner. It was palpable.

Abby turned to the group, gestured to me, and said, “This is Marianne.”

I had never met this woman. We were not wearing name tags. We had not engaged in small talk in the lobby. The character’s name was Marianne, as it always had been, and she had unwittingly chosen a Marianne from the audience to be her. You might not think this is earth shattering. There were certainly audience members and company members who reacted to it like it was just a funny little oddity and when I tried to tell the story to people who hadn’t even been in the room it fell flat too. That’s why I am writing about it–to somehow give voice to the experience I had. Because it wasn’t just an oddity. It was a cosmic pay-attention-smack.

Abby went on to describe the woman and the things that stood out to me were that she was a mother, she was alone after a party, and she was in some distress. The kicker, though, was when she had me place my hands over my eyes and explained that Marianne was having an emotional reaction, that people wanted to comfort her but no one did so she was alone. Writing that out right now those words don’t particularly land. They probably don’t for you either. But in that particular moment of heightened reality and in that other-imposed physicality that was, coincidentally, so like my own, I started to cry.

There are so many reasons why that might resonate with an audience member and there was only one person in that room who knew any part of why the image of a mother feeling isolated in her distress would land so forcefully for me but because the character’s name was my name it felt like a public acknowledgment of private grief and because we were already one unit it wasn’t embarrassing or awkward. It was healing. Sometimes it is enough to say “I see you. I hear you.”

The night before the performance I had attended a large gathering of women from my church. We made blankets for a local children’s hospital, had dinner, and listened to a speaker. I had gone to it thinking, in part, that the speaker would be a balm to my soul. He was funny and had some good things to say but he didn’t really connect with me or with the friend who had come with me. “Has he ever had anything hard happen in his life?” she asked. I suspect the answer would be yes if we were to ask it of him, but we were all individual observers in that forum–unnamed, unseen, and separate. There were many good things that came out of that evening that made me feel more connected to my community but the speaker was not one of them and my private grief remained very private. The contrast between Thursday night and Friday night could not have been more stark. Granted, I am a theatre artist so it’s not so unusual that a theatre piece would speak more to my soul than a sermon at times but it was quite a contrast.

The show created such a visceral sense of unity and because I had become Marianne it all seemed pointed and pertinent–the give and take of being alternately an observer and a participant, the awkwardness of figuring out when to act, the validation of feeling a part of it all. It was bookended by this character, Marianne, and so it was all coloring her existence (and, by extension, mine) but most especially in relation to the situation that had so forcefully come to me at the top of the show. I thought about why, in life, I hesitated to act or reach out. I asked myself if I could go on without those who taught me. I wondered how to build this visceral sense of unity myself. Most of all, though, it gave me a space of heightened senses to alternately examine objectively and examine at some post-conscious level my most overwhelming and emotional problem currently. It was a relief to be wordlessly a part of the whole rather than the partnerless parent talking and talking in the spaces between herself and everyone else.

I have no idea what my experience would have been if the character had been named something else entirely or if I hadn’t been chosen to be her or if I hadn’t happened to be seated next to a company member who shared my awe of the situation. That’s the beauty of this type of show–so many moving parts, so many ways to make meaning. And, like life, the only way to spoil it is to fail to pay attention.