Six friends play house in an old factory basement on the fringe of philadelphia. I wander the space with the rest of the audience and smile at how clearly it spells out this process: All the old furniture they could find, and their hand written letters arranged carefully in the nooks of this raw cement room. I melt watching Dan playing the youngest brother. The way these friends relish their scripted, imagined domestic life together makes obvious how intimately they know and love each other.
Collaboration is hard. As I watch the show I am astonished that these friends conceived this play from nothing in two months, and that they lived together while they did this. When they unravel their family, half-way through the show, it goes from slightly saccharine to ballsy: they stop time, rewind, slow it down, speed it up, fragments of the story bounce around the space and you know the chaos is entirely intentional. They are in perfect sync with each other. I make up stories that they did not intend me to see, and I gasp and cry. This is what intimacy is for, their show is an almost too explicit example. It confirms my conviction that big acts of sharing with other people are the most worthwhile kind of difficult.
Dan comments on the size of the audience: small. and lots of cast member's family. He scans the web for reviews that night, nervously. Where is the public? Where is the praise? They have worked so hard. I want for him the validation he craves because his show is beautiful, but feel saddened by the external craning towards success. I want it too. It is painful that the audience never gets out even a fraction of what you put in. How else could we frame our success?
Collaboration is hard. As I watch the show I am astonished that these friends conceived this play from nothing in two months, and that they lived together while they did this. When they unravel their family, half-way through the show, it goes from slightly saccharine to ballsy: they stop time, rewind, slow it down, speed it up, fragments of the story bounce around the space and you know the chaos is entirely intentional. They are in perfect sync with each other. I make up stories that they did not intend me to see, and I gasp and cry. This is what intimacy is for, their show is an almost too explicit example. It confirms my conviction that big acts of sharing with other people are the most worthwhile kind of difficult.
Dan comments on the size of the audience: small. and lots of cast member's family. He scans the web for reviews that night, nervously. Where is the public? Where is the praise? They have worked so hard. I want for him the validation he craves because his show is beautiful, but feel saddened by the external craning towards success. I want it too. It is painful that the audience never gets out even a fraction of what you put in. How else could we frame our success?
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