This has returned to the Soho Theatre for 3 weeks and I saw it tonight. It is a terrific show, entertainingly distracting, but much more than a distraction, as it really makes you think about your whole adult life. I loved it.
Some spoilers follow. . .
It's daring to write a show in the second person, cos if you address the audience as "you," and they don't feel like you're addressing them, it's gonna throw them out of identifying with "you" lol.
The stunning achievement of the show is that for at least 80 percent of the show, I felt like it WAS about me lol. And I don't identify as female, my biological clock didn't hit menopausal intensity at around the age of 40, and I am considerably older than Haley McGee so could easily say, "Oh, what do you know about aging? You're young!"
The set-up is that McGee has written a bunch of universal-ish stories about the experiences of aging from 25 to death. They are told chronologically, and only half of them are told (the front row, onstage, pick which stories will be told, by choosing titles from cards), because, different people know different stories about different people, after all, so it mirrors and reflects that, that life is fleeting and we miss things along the way.
Anyway, I could have shook my front row, cos they didn't pick "Hospital" and "Baby." As a woman in her mid-thirties, and an excellent storyteller, McGee might have had a lot of interesting things to say about how her character negotiated her inner-Yerma and decided not to have children. Instead, I watched McGee destroy the "Baby" card, and simply inform us that "you" decided not to have kids, and moved on. Oh the frustration lol!
The "Hospital" card pertained, I think, to visiting a suicidal friend in hospital. I think the way we deal with depression and suicide in fiction is fascinating and important, and I wanted to hear about that. Instead, I watched McGee destroy the card and move on.
Anyway, the stories we did get tonight were wonderful. Many of them resonated personally (for example, McGee said "your Dad is writing his biography" and I'm like, holy crap, "you" know me lol, and the one about the"Dog" absolutely slaughtered me).
Anyhow, the journey from peak physicality through various ages to death is one we all make, and through self-knowledge and research into people's life stories, utilising a deep compassion and wit, McGee succeeds in moving beyond mere distraction to getting her audience to contemplate their whole life.
It's like getting buried, attending your own funeral, then finding out only 70 minutes have passed and whatever you have left is still ahead of you.
It's really great. 4 and a half stars from me. The other half star is for when someone tells a story in the second person so universal I'm never thrown out at all. Not gonna happen. This is probably as good as it gets.
