Tactile Emotions
Posted by Polly Carl on 3/12/2010
(Polly is the Director of Artistic Development at Steppenwolf)
Recently I got obsessed with Dexter, that cable show about a serial killer who kills bad guys. After watching four seasons in about two weeks (I said obsessed), I found myself stressed out, worrying about Dexter, would he get away with it? I was rooting for him. Good storytelling will often put us in surprising emotional and intellectual states. I find it even more powerful when this happens in theater, when we imagine ourselves in places we’ve never been or identify with outsiders completely unlike us. In theater, I like to think of those emotions as almost tactile: we feel them because we’re in such close proximity to the living, breathing actor.
The Garage Rep currently running at Steppenwolf in our Garage space is the kind of tactile experience that makes me love theater. The three companies - Dog & Pony Theatre Company, Pavement Group, and XIII Pocket - represent a slice of the best of the storefront scene in Chicago. I’m new to that scene and I’ve spent the last several months going from rehearsal space to space, and the experience is like being invited into someone’s living room. It’s up close and visceral. We’re proud to have collaborated with these three companies to bring you into proximity with stories that will compel you to challenge your notions of love, language, and adolescence.
XIII Pocket’s Adore confronts us with an untenable version of love. Based on a true story, Adore explores the lives of two men whose love is based on total consumption in the literal sense. Two men recognize that their emptiness can only be filled through a cannibalistic act. We experience their truth through a two-dimensional account of their courting, supported by a movie screen sized projection of their worlds through their own eyes.
Dog & Pony’s The Twins Would Like to Say is also based on a true story of two young twins in England who make a pact of silence. While we never hear them speak in the play, we get a sense of their truth through the stories they write. Dog & Pony has cleverly staged the stories these girls write but never speak, and by the end of this promenade we come to greater understanding of the limits of language to reveal identity.
Pavement Group’s punkplay, written by Gregory Moss, is a coming of age story of two boys drawn to the punk movement as their entrance into selfhood. In this fast-paced and deftly directed performance, we never leave the boy’s bedroom yet we travel a lifetime watching them fall in and out of love with the music that will forever shape them.
This is all to say that, as I watched these plays develop over the last few months and had the privilege of sitting in some rehearsals and seeing several performances, I found myself rooting for this group of outsiders even though their lives are so distant from my own… it’s that tactile thing, when the lights go down and the actors walk out on stage, anything can happen.