The Mumble editor indulges himself
Once more, at the Edinburgh Fringe
I must admit, I have a soft-spot for American, Off-Broadway-style solo-performance theatre. The British do it too, of course, but the Americans do it to an excess which I guess people might understand after the gregariousness of the recent World Cup. Advertisement-fill’d ‘drinks breaks,’ fer feck’s sake – what was all that about?
There is something especially American, I think, about getting up on a stage alone & saying, essentially, here I am, this is what happen’d to me, & I’m going to make theatre out of it. The results can be excruciating when they go wrong, but when they go right there is an intimacy & an electricity to the form which a dozen actors & a truckload of scenery cannot necessarily reproduce. Performer, confessor, comedian & celebrant all become the same person.
There is something about this Off-Broadway solo stuff that makes me really understand what it must be like to be American. You see, we in the old tribal soup of Europe are connected to our soil. We’re lazy about it; we don’t really need to express our humanity quite so loudly, so much of that humanity being already embedded in where we come from. But not so for the dislocated millions of Americans, whatever generation, whose soil isn’t quite their own, but whose souls float about in the tank like jellyfish. Therefore, to be human, one must sometimes shout it from the rooftops – or at least spend an hour shouting it from a stage to whoever cares to listen. I care. It’s well cool.
The other day I decided to take two in, almost back-to-back, bringing along my pal Siobhan for an extra set of eyes & ears – & a camera for photos. First up was the Dionysian Michael John Ciszewski in MOTHER, SUPERIOR, by xo Michael John, a diva-worshipping paean to his ever-adoring mother, her complete understanding of his sexuality, & his mission to make her a saint.
For all its flamboyance, this is actually a surprisingly cerebral piece. Ciszewski comes at the relationship between mother & son from all manner of angles – theological, psychological, philosophical & fabulously ridiculous – while somehow keeping a firm hand upon the emotional thread connecting them. At one point we are teleported back into his childhood, into a Palace of Versailles-style hall of mirrors establish’d by his mother to make their house look bigger. It is a wonderfully apt image for the show itself: mother & son reflected backwards & forwards thro’ memory, each helping to construct the other’s image of themselves.
The phrase “semi-independent intergenerational beings” particularly stood out. For beneath all the divadom & delicious excess, this is what MOTHER, SUPERIOR is really examining: where exactly does a mother end & her child begin? We grow away from our parents, supposedly, while carrying great chunks of them around inside us. Ciszewski seems fascinated by this peculiar state of mutual independence & dependence, especially when the mother in question has understood & champion’d the sexuality of her son rather than attempting to suppress it.
Life growing up for Michael seems to have been a constant collision of nature, nurture & orthodonture – identity being form’d, teeth being straighten’d, & the general confusion of childhood gradually giving way to something considerably more serious. That confusion was made infinitely more intense by the trauma he felt in 2001, when an almost innocent childhood fascination with the World Trade Center suddenly collided with one of the most infamous events in modern history.
As a child Michael lov’d the Twin Towers, & had actually visited them only two days before 9/11. It’s an extraordinary detail, made all the more powerful when a newspaper clipping is projected before us revealing that the young Michael was subsequently interview’d at Ground Zero. Suddenly the flamboyance drops away & something startlingly real enters the room: a child trying to process history while actually standing inside it.
This is Off-Broadway at its heart – intensely personal memory colliding with a moment recognisable to the entire world, one individual life becoming, however briefly, part of history itself.
And then, of course, there is the small matter of getting Mum into Heaven with the correct paperwork.
The beatification process is laid out before our eyes, with Ciszewski gleefully applying the bureaucratic machinery of Catholic sainthood to his own maternal devotion. Miracles require evidence before the eyes of God; celestial boxes must be tick’d; proof must be assembled. What begins as filial adoration becomes an ecclesiastical application process, with Ciszewski simultaneously acting as advocate, witness & chief theological troublemaker.
One of the show’s loveliest conceits is the collision between ancient Catholic procedure & the language of our hyper-connected present. Before Mum can gain access to the celestial mainframe, she must effectively pass through heavenly cyber-security – several-factor authentication for the soul. It’s a very funny image, but also characteristic of Ciszewski’s method: high theology meets the everyday, the sacred bumps into the ridiculous, & beneath both sits a son trying to prove something which, to him at least, requires no proof whatsoever.
His mother is already a saint. The rest is admin.
After Michael, me & my photographer for the day, Siobhan, strutted thro’ town, down into Princes Street Gardens & across into the New Town – pure Edinburgh stuff. As we went, she regaled me with the tale of her baby 21-year-old self standing on that very spot near the art gallery & declaring that one day she’d love to live in Edinburgh. She now does so, owning her own house with enough free time to come & hang out with The Mumble team for an afternoon.
There’s something lovely about that, I think. A young woman stands somewhere & imagines a future version of herself; years later she walks across the exact same patch of earth actually living it. Which, considering we’d just watch’d Michael rummaging around the reflected versions of his own past, seemed somehow perfectly appropriate.
Next up was Shamaniac, written, perform’d & Fringe debut’d by Dede Lovejoy, & directed by Joy Donze. Now then, a few years ago I review’d Donze’s one-woman show at the Fringe, 13 & Not Pregnant, which ended to vigorous standing applause. “Here we see two time-divided Joys,” I wrote at the time, “the teenage archivist & the accomplished adult performer – segued together into theatre of unadulterated & contrapuntal perfection…”
I guess this is what soften’d my spot for American solo shows. It was that good.
This time Donze remains offstage, directing Lovejoy through an altogether different autobiographical landscape. Lovejoy possesses that crucial solo-performer quality of making an audience feel less like spectators than confidants. There is no ensemble to hide among, no dramatic machinery to take over when things get difficult: it is simply her, her history & us. She carries that exposure remarkably well, shifting between humour, vulnerability & a kind of hard-won serenity without ever making the evening feel like a lecture in how the rest of us ought to live.
“I was in a session with my pretty therapist, at the end of her couch, at the end of my rope,” begins Dede Lovejoy – a fine example of the quality of her excellently scripted production. There is a literary neatness to that opening which runs throughout Shamaniac: witty, self-aware & rhythmically sharp, even when she is leading us into some very dark corners.
Lovejoy is also a fantastic performer thro’ & thro’. This is energetic, demanding stuff, & at certain points the sheer physicality becomes almost ritualistic. I felt at times as tho’ I were watching a Corybantes dance in some Minoan courtyard, so authentically primal was her performance – less an actress representing an altered state than somebody apparently surrendering herself to one before our eyes. Whatever one’s personal relationship with shamans, spirit guides & alternative therapies, it is difficult not to be swept along by the commitment of the woman enacting them.
She can flip our minds too. At one extraordinary point Lovejoy begins communing with her ancestors, each woman representing another generation, another link in the great female chain which has eventually produced the woman standing before us. The theatrical transformation is simple but remarkably effective: suddenly the stage seems populated.
A solo show isn’t quite solo any more. Lovejoy has summon’d a lineage.
This is what makes Shamaniac considerably more interesting than a straightforward account of alternative healing. In her search for physical & emotional recovery, Lovejoy surg’d beyond the boundaries of Western medicine, guided by shamans, spirit guides, sound baths & other therapies. But the journey ultimately seems to be as much about connection as cure – connection with the body, with the past, with those who came before her & finally with another human being in the here & now.
For after the “deaths of so many the ones,” the final flesh-&-blood woman she encounters is the woman who is now her partner. And Dede is full of happiness for it – you can tell. This isn’t happiness perform’d because the script requires a satisfying final act; it radiates from her. After all the searching, suffering, spirits, ancestors & accumulated emotional archaeology, there is something beautifully simple about discovering that the destination is another living person.
By then the fit-as-feck, pull-upping, bean-eating contemporary Lovejoy before us seems almost to be looking back across several previous incarnations of herself. There is contentment here, certainly, but it feels earn’d rather than conveniently arriv’d at. The woman who began at the end of her therapist’s couch & the end of her rope has somehow work’d her way back along it.
And what a ferociously physical, funny & moving piece of theatre she has made from the climb.
Donze’s direction seems particularly alert to the rhythms required by confessional theatre. A solo autobiographical show cannot simply be somebody telling you what happen’d next; revelation needs tension, comedy needs release & silence occasionally needs to be trusted. Lovejoy is allow’d those silences. When the emotional punches arrive, they therefore feel earn’d rather than signposted.
Seen almost back-to-back, MOTHER, SUPERIOR & Shamaniac made unexpectedly complementary companions. Ciszewski looks outward & upward, transforming his mother into a saint through the exuberant machinery of camp; Lovejoy looks inward, rummaging through body, memory & spirit in search of the person she has eventually become.
One builds an altar, the other undertakes a pilgrimage. But both depend upon the same wonderfully audacious proposition of American solo theatre: that one person’s life, properly told, is enough. No cast of twenty. No revolving stage. No helicopter descending from the rafters. Just a human being, a roomful of strangers & the dangerous little conviction that, for an hour or so, their story might become ours as well. Perhaps that’s my soft-spot explain’d.
Me & Siobhan were now on the tipsy side of sobriety, & off we went into the Edinburgh night, discussing the plays as we wander’d thro’ the Fringe, before dancing at Stramash, then drinking & jamming at the Doghouse ’til 1AM with our mate Tam. A drinken, hedonistic ending to a hyper-cultural day—theatre, philosophy, autobiography, booze, music & dancing all somehow squeez’d into the same few hours.
This is Edinburgh. This is the Fringe.
Words: Damo
Photos: Siobhan