By “… dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.” The preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde.
On a sweaty spring afternoon at rush hour I was running through a downtown Denver parking garage, late for a blind date at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Text me when you get to the museum!” “Tailor” had urged me in a text message the night before. First date jitters had me entirely twitterpated. I’ve never gone to meet someone unsure of anything but the time, the place, and their name. As I caught my breath on the second floor of MCA’s Georgia O’Keeffe inspired exhibit, Tailor approached me with a shy, “Are you Natalie?” and we were off.
Presented by Off-Center, “The Blind Date” is one piece in the “Between Us” trilogy of one performer and one audience member immersive theatre pieces. The “most unpredictable arm of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Off-Center focuses more on connecting people and upending expectations than on adhering to theatrical tradition,” according to the center’s site. The trilogy of intimate performances, each created by a unique group of creatives from near and far, runs until May 26 and is quickly selling out. “The Blind Date” was written and directed by Lauren Ludwig and produced by Monica Miklas, of Capital W out of Los Angeles.
After many years of collaborating in the music and sketch comedy group Lost Moon Radio, Lauren and Monica created Capital W in 2015 to explore their shared passion for unconventional, immersive, and site-specific theater. I saw a few parts of their first eight-part work, “Hamlet Mobile,” at the Denver International Film Festival’s Virtual Reality and Immersive Works and was bowled over by the intimate performance of excerpts from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” performed in the back of a cargo van for audiences of one or two at a time.
When I asked the director about the intimacy of small audiences, Lauren Ludwig replied, “Our mission as a company is to create experiences for audience members where genuine transformation is possible. While that can happen in larger groups, we are drawn to explore the transformational power of one-on-one interactions. It means our audience members can deeply invest and participate in our work. It also means our actors can really take in each audience member and tailor their energy to that person. We find this creatively fruitful and deeply valuable. Both our actors and, we hope, our audience members, benefit from the exchange.” It’s fitting, then, that their last two shows have been one-on-one dates between an actor and an audience member. Isn’t a date the prototypical performance for a small audience? Dating as a theme is relevant to our times — as courtship rituals undergo yet another upheaval — and to Capital W’s concurrent and most recent production called “RED FLAG.”
Theoretically there can be real connection in abstraction; there’s something about anonymity that loosens people up. The darkness of the confessional, the liberation of the business trip, the masks in Eyes Wide Shut all seem to prove this. When I first heard of the conceit I was reminded of Miranda July’s short lived app Somebody1. Sad, strident, and strange, the app asked strangers to deliver messages between friends, lovers, and family members. The indie film darling, July, made a ten minute short film2 that demonstrates the app with her signature twee, shoegazey pop-surrealism.
While Somebody the app tasked users to approach nearby strangers with messages from their loved ones-break-ups, apologies, compliments — “Between Us” combined two strangers without a message, other than the fabricated context of a set-up by our fictional and mutual friend, Sarah. Without a kernel of reality, I felt unmoored but I played along. Now I love playing, but I still wonder if this was actually a play. “The piece is much more scripted than people realize,” the writer and director, Ludwig, told me. “We worked to create a full backstory for the character so that the actor has material to draw on when improvising is needed. The actors are empowered to read their audience member and go with the flow, but they are also hitting very specific beats and dialogue throughout.”
It was hard to tell where the improvisation and the script intersected. Needless to say, it’s a blurry line between one-on-one intimate conversation as an immersive performance and therapy. One of the questions discussed at this year’s inaugural Denver Immersive Summit was this very thing: Should actors be practicing mental health medicine without a license? Now don’t get me wrong, I love blurred lines. But this encounter shook me and I’m still unsure of how to take it.
As Tailor, played by Chelsea Frye with warmth and depth, started off the small talk on Georgia O’Keeffe and introductions, I felt immediately at ease. We strolled the galleries and enjoyed each others’ company. At several, seemingly predetermined moments, she revealed increasingly poignant, personal, and tragic truths about her recent life. By dropping hints to get me to ask the right questions and by gently prodding my sense of mimetic desire or empathy, I found myself reciprocating. I told her things about my childhood, my upbringing, my recurring nightmares about infinity, and how I think I’ll die. It’s alarming and amusing to discover we all love to talk about ourselves so much that all it takes is someone who looks interested asking, “What about you? Are you close to your mom?” and we just let is all come spilling out. More than once I felt the rush of compassion I usually only feel as an actor, lover, mother, or friend. I’m reminded of Richard Seyd, a San Francisco acting coach, who called rehearsal “going to the empathy gym” and the phrase never felt more apt.
In Marina Abramovic’s piece “The Artist is Present” she sits silently in a gallery and makes strong eye contact with anyone who takes the seat across from her. Under her gaze some participants are overwhelmed by emotion and crumble. I often felt this way when Tailor looked at me but more often I felt disingenuous. I found myself reciprocating with stories from my life told in heightened tone, poeticized, and sexed-up to fit the drama of her revelations. The style of her acting was realistic and natural but I found myself playing a hyper-realistic version of myself.
The way she’d compliment me or tell me she felt a connection between us made me blush because I knew it was part of the script. I blushed not because I’m bashful but for the reasons you blush with sympathetic embarrassment when the waiter laughs too hard at your weak joke, one he’s probably heard a million times before. Even so, all the ways it should have been awkward, it wasn’t. I think we both found each other amusing, attractive, and interesting. It was awkward in a much more disturbing way. I made it awkward by being my curated self.
Several immersive pieces I’ve attended lately rely heavily on the body scan or guided meditation as a tool to get audience members to turn inward. Sometimes it’s effective but it often feels like a shortcut to personal relevance or meaning. I’m a big fan of mind-altering new-agey rides in my head. Someone says, “Close your eyes and take a deep breath,” and I’m there. However, the convention can’t make up for a lack of substance. While holding hands with Tailor as she guided me through a thought exercise didn’t reveal much to me, I found the most startling truth in the way I edited myself into the most equally pathetic, hopeful, dreamy version to fit with Tailor on our date. Were her character more cynical, flirtatious, or arrogant I would have been the same.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s detective novel The Eye he wrote, “For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” I always found that sentiment sad but true and this piece brought it to mind.
With the exception of a few moments like those in Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present”3 where I eschewed first date decorum and asked Tailor if I could give her a hug, I was painfully aware of how I was being played and how I was playing a version of myself. The interactions between Tailor and I were startlingly equal; we were both acting fictional parts. As an actor playing a role, Tailor’s was the more honest job. The part I played was a composite of my narcissism, anxiety, and ultimately a projection of who I think I am. This is how “Between Us: Blind Date” was really, to my chagrin, a play about me. I thought I was going to be the foil to a single actor’s performance but instead she was the foil to my own self-examination. This revelation was a shock.
Perhaps that’s the genius of the piece. Without me realizing it, the piece made me the main character. But this wasn’t celebrating the “real” me but outing a composite simulacra of my selves I had been coerced into presenting by my scene partner and the context of a set-up. I’m always saying that art should shake us from our comfort zones. This one shook me hard.
It hurts when it happens to you. It made me feel uncomfortable realities about my own disingenuousness, realize how malleable the many versions of myself are, and question how mimetic behavior and context mold all aspects of my identity. I looked in the mirror Art held up to Nature and felt the rage of Caliban as I faced the flawed reality of myself. “Blind Date” gave me something ineffable I needed. The piece told me things about myself I’ve never heard, perhaps because no one has the guts to tell me. It left me breathless and hollowed out. This was the artful reckoning I needed so much and didn’t know it. I needed to play act myself to examine my own phoniness and hypocrisy. We need art that puts us on blast. But it’s true what they say about therapy and art; those who need it most can’t afford it.
1 http://somebodyapp.com/
2 See “Miu Miu Women’s Tales #8 – Somebody” Miranda July, 2014
3 See “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” 2012 documentary
