By Rick Mortensen
Playing in ten small rooms near the back of Urban Arts Gallery in Salt Lake City, Sackerson and Umbrella Theater Company’s A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer is both an engineering marvel and a moving look inside the mind and psyche of the title character. Creators Dave Mortensen, Morag Shepherd, and Alex Ungerman have devised an intimate portrait of a complex man told in two sets of ten scenes of equal length, each in a different room and presented in a random order. At the beginning of the show, the ten audience members (there can only be ten) each draw a card telling them the order of the ten numbered rooms they will each enter alone. Then, when the music starts in the hall, they move to the next room, visiting each room once in each act.
Each room, designed by a different designer (except for two rooms designed by Dan Evans), is a delightful surprise, and they change slightly between acts to reveal new clues in the life of the fictional character, Walter Eyer. The creation of the piece appears to have been completely collaborative: It was conceived and created by Mortensen, Shepherd, and Ungerman; it has writing by Shepherd, Matthew Ivan Bennett, and Shawn Francis Saunders; and it is directed by Shepherd, Mortensen, and Jamie Rocha Allen.
In both acts, three of the rooms have actors in them, who enact an intimate scene in extremely close quarters with the audience member playing Walter. The rooms without an actor in them advance the story in inventive ways, including film, audio, interactive electronics, and even handwritten notes.
What makes the piece into a moving, soul-changing work of art instead of a spook-ally/scavenger hunt is the empathy, nuance, and subtlety with which the company tells the story. Regardless of the order of the scenes, Walter unfolds gradually in scenes of startling beauty, wit, and pain. The time constraints leave little room for extraneous details, and the audience members must play close attention to catch it all. If they miss something, the attitude of the company is in the lyrics of the Tom Rosenthal song “Take Your Guess” that permeates the piece: “That’s fine.”
The actors—Holly Fowers, Emily Nash, and Jesse Nepivoda the night I saw it—are more than up to the task, and each displays range, control, and commitment in the two characters they each play. Nepivoda is both menacing and vulnerable; Nash is both playful and unforgivingly angry; Fowers shows the full range of what it means to nurture. It’s likely a show like this will attract audience members who are trained in improv and who (like this reviewer) cannot resist getting into the character of Walter and responding. The actors are fully prepared to roll with this and even to feed off the energy. (However, the audience members should be mindful of the time constraints in each room.)
More details about the plot or even sets would spoil the many surprises that make this show such a delight. The designs by Adam Day, Brookelyn Morgan, and Sophia Lucker were particularly striking, but more information than this would veer into spoiler territory. The story is both specifically Mormon and specifically gay, but both those aspects are portrayed so sensitively and respectfully that they are unlikely to give offense. Though the themes are adult—Sackerson recommends ages 16+ and issues a trigger warning of a brief scene involving conversion therapy—there is nothing very explicit or heretical. The most challenging aspect of the show is being alone in a room with an actor inches away enacting an intimate, sometimes uncomfortable scene. It is also the most moving. It’s the kind of show I would fly to New York just to see. Sackerson’s mission is to provide new shows in unconventional spaces to bold audiences, and A Brief Waltz in a Little Room actually has the effect of making the audience bolder; if you’re feeling even a little bold, make your way down to Urban Arts Gallery for A Brief Waltz in a Little Room.
Sackerson and Umbrella Theater Company Presents A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer, by Dave Mortensen, Morag Shepherd, and Alex Underman, in collaboration with Mathew Ivan Bennett and Shawn Francis Saunders.
Urban Arts Gallery, 116 South Rio Grand Drive (at Gateway), Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
August 23 – September 14, 2019, Thursdays 7:00 PM, 8:30 PM; Fridays and Saturdays 6:00 PM, 7:30 PM, 9:00 PM
Tickets: $25-$35, prices vary depending on group size
Sackerson Theatre Website
Sackerson Theatre Facebook Page
A Brief Waltz in a Little Room Facebook Event
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