The Greeks believed that music had the capacity to rearrange us from the inside out. I think they were on to something. On Thursday night I attended a concert hoping for this sort of molecular realignment but was sadly disappointed. But that's okay. On the following night, I wandered down to the East Village to the Theatre 80 on St. Marks Place, where I have seen all sorts of different shows and films, some of which moved me more than others. Friday night I bought a ticket to hear Edgar Oliver tell a story in five parts called simply: Helen & Edgar which is a chronicle of the unique bond he shared with his sister Helen.
Today is Sunday. I only first spoke about the experience this morning over breakfast with a friend. Prior to that I was too shaken up, too altered (molecularly?) to begin to put into words how moved I was. But why?
Truthfully, I'm still unclear as to what happened to me in that theatre. Essentially the lights went down and for almost two hours a slender softspoken man told a story. And as is true in most great storytelling, he gave us the facts in his arrangement in his own pacing such that we filled in the emotional resonance for ourselves.
As more and more of our culture gets louder and louder and more sardonic and meta-meta, I found it so refreshing to be drawn into the tiny imaginative world shared by two children and their paranoid mother with absolutely zero wink-winking on the part of the storyteller. Edgar Oliver is the most ballsy kind of writer one could be at this moment in history because he is nakedly sentimental and totally exposed, refusing to hide behind fashionable traps such as the "self-effacing/self-aggrandizing" or the "holy shit none of this means anything really" masks worn by so many today.
I don't want to spoil it for any of you in NYC and available btwn now and the end of October. Suffice it to say, there's a lot to chew on in this tale and it is beautifully directed by my old pal Catherine Burns, who co-produced my first feature film, All the Rage. She has found a new outlet as Artistic Director of The Moth where she helps storytellers sculpt the stories they want to tell. She's obviously very good at this and I'm looking forward to seeing more of her work in longform story.
Her direction reminded me a bit of Paul Stein's direction of Antonio Sacre in his monologue The Next Best Thing, which I wrote about when it played last year's United Solo festival. The story always comes first, the performer is there to serve the story and the director is there to simply help that happen. Subtlety is key as is the performer's command of the clock.
For more info on Helen & Edgar, here's a link to the show's website.
