Credit: Tim Matheson
At The Cultch until May 26 at 5:30pm
Tickets from $12 at tickets.thecultch.com or at the door
Posted May 26, 2019
This is an odd little show: part meditation, part travelogue and part adventure. The parts, however, don’t come together in a very satisfying way. It begins with playwright/director Julie Hammond coming out of the audience and pouring sand from a small cooler onto the lid of a larger cooler; it takes ages. It’s meditative, for sure.
The travelogue component kicks in when the narrator (Stephanie Wong, as the surrogate for Hammond) leaves California to learn to surf in Slovakia where her Jewish grandmother lived. Landlocked, Slovakia seems like an odd place for the playwright to go to surf and it was only in the talkback session that Hammond revealed that she wasn’t actually surfing in Slovakia, she was wake-boarding on a lake. As a travelogue, we don’t get much in the way of details.
As for adventure, we suddenly find the narrator, face bloodied, in an ambulance on her way to the hospital. What? What happened? Oh, she lost a tooth while surfing/wakeboarding. Again, in the talkback, Hammond reveals that it was actually the handle of another wakeboarder’s tow line that hit her in the face. In the play itself we are left to assume she fell face first on her surfboard.
Credit: Tim Matheson
There’s real adventure, however, in Hammond’s grandmother’s story and we don’t get nearly enough of that. In what may have been a technical problem the night I saw the show, the grandmother talks at length on tape about her Dachau experience during WW II. The volume was fine but the sound quality was mushy. I spoke to a few others in the audience and we all agreed; all we got was “Dachau”, that of the eleven in the family only four survived the Holocaust, that the grandmother’s hair was not cut in the concentration camp and she was served thin soup once a day. It was frustrating to miss so much of her story. The tape was long and I kept senselessly looking to the person doing the ASL (sign language), hoping for help there. Hopefully, for tonight’s performance, that glitch will be remedied.
Props – like potted palms – come on. Then off. Then back on. Ditto folding beach chairs, inflatable palm trees. A deck chair. Truly, I have never seen props come and go with such regularity. In this, Stephanie Wong was assisted by Bana Biltaji and Dominique Hat. Each time a prop returned, it felt as if it was really important but its relevance was never clear.
Credit: Tim Matheson
Onstage guitar music played stage right by Matthew Ariaratnam is lovely: peaceful, soothing, contemplative. And I loved when Wong crooned “California Dreaming”. Ah, California.
I wanted so much more from this show – more adventure, more relevance, more Slovakia, more grandmother. Less Gidget.
I’m sorry I completely missed the boat on Other Inland Empires.
The rEvolver Festival, presented by Upintheair Theatre, continues through June 2, 2019 at The Cultch. For further information and schedule: https://www.upintheairtheatre.com