Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Some years ago, a famous singer contacted me to explore the idea of my writing a solo show for her. We had a few pleasant meetings to talk about structure and tone and which out of her catalogue of songs to include in the evening. Part of her history, though, included the death of a child. It pained her to talk about it with me and I asked her if she really wanted to go through with dealing with that every night of the run of the show. I don’t know if it was this that made her have second thoughts, but she decided to drop the project.

I think of this whenever I see an autobiographic solo show that deals with painful material. I wonder if it is psychologically healthy for someone to revisit traumatic events performance after performance. If you are one of those performers who connect deeply with their material, how can it not cause fresh pain? Or, for self-protection, do you think of the next seven minutes about Dad’s suicide as “the bit about Dad” and find yourself unintentionally trivializing tragedy?

One new tactic appeared at New York Theater Workshop in I Love You So Much I Could Die written and performed by Mona Pirnot and directed by Lucas Hnath. Pirnot avoids having to perform painful material every show by, well, by not performing it. She sits facing upstage listening to a text-to-voice utility “read” her text. We can’t see her face, only her back and her back isn’t all that expressive. Since we can’t see much that informs our understanding of the text and we don’t hear her voice, her back (at least for me) becomes a kind of screen onto which to project imagined emotions. The show might as well be done with a dummy seated in the chair except I can’t help but wonder how it affects Pirnot to hear her same text mechanically read back to her again and again. Does she hear stuff she wishes she could rephrase? Or does she give herself permission to drift off and think about other things until it’s time for her to sing a song? Because, yes, she does sing a few appealing songs, still facing upstage.

The presentation irritated my companion, who is herself a performer. She felt it tested the limits of how little you could do and still call something a performance. For her, it wasn’t enough. For me, I guess it was enough that it triggered a provocative chain of thought.

It also provided a contrast to another solo show I saw recently, Dael Orlandersmith’s Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance at the Rattlestick Theater. Orlandersmith’s piece was not autobiographic but a richly-detailed work about a character named Virgil who is moved first to become a hospice worker and then a mortician. Among possible careers, becoming a mortician has to be one I would find least appealing, but the piece makes the journey understandable and moving. In contrast to the Spartan presentation Pirnot and Hnath came up with, this staging, directed by Neel Keller, is filled with design garnishing — lighting and sound effects, even what I gather is a hologram. I thought the material was strong enough to not need this enhancement. I would have preferred it if Orlandersmith had presented it more simply. Yes, facing us.