Review by David Grazia, Guest Reviewer, Front Row Reviewers
Every summer both new and established theatre artists in Salt Lake City (and Utah at large) converge in a series of locations around town and perform work – most often the work is brand spanking new and has never before been seen by the public. This year marks the 11th iteration of the GSL Fringe – and I’m a little embarrassed to say it’s my first experience with it. Better late than never.
The aesthetic of the shows at Fringe is notable. As 20+ shows have to repeatedly rotate in and out of the same three performance spaces over the course of two weekends, shows are designed to be minimalistic. Bells and whistles are non-existent. Lighting is highly limited and sets are restricted to what can be moved in and out of the performance space in the span of 15 minutes. Each show therefore comes to live and die on the strength of its performances, directing, and writing.
Thankfully, even in a bare bones format, Sackerson’s The Words At The Door has everything it needs.
My first Sackerson experience came to me last year with their show In Your Dreams – and while The Words At The Door is less ambitious in presentation than that show (by Fringe rules, it has to be), it’s possibly more emotionally devastating.
This show hits you. At around 50 minutes long, it packs a concise and highly potent punch.
At its core, it’s a simple story. Jumping backwards and forwards through time, we watch two former lovers, Anna (Kristina Shearer and Michael (Jason Hackney), as they sift through ‘the wreckage of their past’ and attempt to find their ways to acceptance, forgiveness and moving forward. On the stage it becomes something more delicate and ethereal.
Shearer and Hackney are simply terrific together. From the first moment they physically touch very early on in the piece, it’s clear they are locked in – connected to one another. They both skillfully navigate the turns of what becomes a complex and nuanced relationship. Shearer is physically small in stature, but she provides Anna with a fire that you can see hovering just behind her eyes. As the relationship between the pair disintegrates, that fire is at times both fierce and tragic. Hackney pulls off a trick on the opposite end of the spectrum – towering over Shearer (he’s a tall guy) we most often see him using his body to curl into itself. Michael is a person at war with himself and Hackney uses his physicality to reflect this internal struggle. In a clever nod to this theme, director Matthew Ivan Bennett often stages Michael low – in a bed, on the floor, the first time we see him he’s splayed out in a bathtub before the play even begins, just a faceless body disappearing into a white void.
Jesse Nepivoda’s script is by turns mysterious, surprising, often funny, and heartbreaking. I also appreciated how it took its time in revealing its secrets. There’s not a ‘twist’, per se, but there’s a pretty major release of information that Nepivoda holds off until about halfway through the text, that spins the story off into a new direction. What I thought was mainly one thing spirals sideways and becomes something unexpected. But what could have become maudlin or sentimental never does. Nepivoda doesn’t let it. It’s clear he truly cares about Anna and Michael and has a deep well of empathy for both of them.
One the show’s greatest strengths is that Bennett and Nepivoda trust their audience to follow along as they drop crumbs and clues into the world they have built. As Michael says near the beginning of the show in a humorous bit of meta, fourth-wall breaking, “You’re talking about a galaxy made of dreams instead of stars. It’s weird. These people don’t know what’s going on” – but Bennett and Nepivoda aren’t interested in holding your hand every step of the way, they trust you enough to follow the hazy, dream-esque world that we find ourselves in and where unusual things sometimes happen. In an absolutely beautifully bit of physicality threaded throughout the show, Shearer’s Anna literally pulls past moments and memories out of the air, and inserts them into her chest seconds before she relives them. It’s stunning.
Bennett provides an easily and quickly grasped set of ‘rules’ to help us navigate the play’s shifts through time and space. An off-kilter and otherworldly set of sustained bass notes smartly helps us to follow the pair as they leap in and out of moments from their shared relationship and the actor’s bare feet seem to literally and metaphorically ground them to a world that might spin the characters off and out of it if they aren’t careful.
It all builds to a final image that I won’t spoil but will say devastated me with its simplicity, longing, and ache.
And, really, simplicity, longing, and ache are the spine of this show. Bennett seems to know exactly how to guide Shearer and Hackney through the pulse that emanates from Nepivoda’s words and the team takes the audience along with them with care.
Make time for this piece. Its run is short – two weekends, six total performances. The performances, writing and directing are a beautiful reminder of the talent, thoughtfulness and yearning that exists in our very own backyard.
Make the time – the words are at the door.
Produced by Morag Shepherd, Matthew Ivan Bennett, Jesse Nepivoda
Rehearsal Photos by Doug Carter
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