Autism on Stage

The Rogue surprised us on Saturday afternoon. We left laughing, smiling, feeling good about the world in general, after watching Hunter Hnat inhabit the role of Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

To call it triumphant is to understate the sorrow nestled inside.the story.  Christopher can't bear to be touched.  Loud noises send him into a tizzy.... I've been thinking about describing it and that's the best I can do.  He's uncontrollable and inconsolable and angry and hurt and scared and furious all at the same time.... and you watch his Mom and his Dad hold their breaking hearts together... barely.

He undertakes pragmatic projects, like passing his maths A levels three years earlier than most, and personal projects, involving trust and distance and doing what he doesn't think he wants to do at all.  There's never a moment of pity.  There's frustration and aggravation and terror and annoyance riding right alongside the love and affection and concern.... always the concern.

It's hard to love him, and they love him so.

The music was percussive and personal; hands on knees, on the sides of the cubes on which the actors sat, mouth noises ranging from beatbox through chanting to poetry.  The Director's Notes told us that All actors remain onstage unless prescrbed otherwise. That Greek Chorus stomped their feet when the scene shifted, hummed a few bars as they hustled through London, and managed to create discrete characters and a milling mob at the same time. Once again, The Rogue did much with little.

I'm always leary of book-to-play experiences, but between last season's Grapes of Wrath and this year's Curious Incident, I may be forced to change my mind.

Angels in America - Millenium Approaches in Tucson

Scarlett and I sat for more than three hours this weekend.  With two intermissions and three acts which built upon one another until the whole thing came toppling down... or rising up... or burst into a zillion crisis pieces... the performance ended with a gasp from the audience and then.... silence.

Absolute silence preceded thunderous applause.  Though the applause must have been gratifying for the cast and crew, the silence was more telling... and spoke louder than the clapping of our hands. Matthew Bowdren's directorial debut left us stunned, speechless, moved, hollowed out, and aching for more.

Loss and abandonment, denial and greed and the consequences of living a lie.... The Rogue Theater's subject matter never leaves us laughing. We are thoughtful, introspective, wrung out, and shaky; our smiles are for the excellence of the production and do not reflect the angst we've experienced from our seats.  Someone must have written a worthwhile comedy, don't you think?

A quick survey of those sitting around us revealed that none of us had seen the play before.  Since we were all of a certain age, the play's setting was all too familiar to us.  1985 - Ronald Reagan and AIDS and the elevation of greed to an art form - was very real to us.  Big Cuter saw the play as history; we remembered the reality and saw no reason to subject ourselves to a retelling.... until now.

There were teary, older, gay men leaving the show.  I spent the afternoon thinking of my social work colleague, the third person in Chicago to die of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.... AIDS before it had a catchy moniker.  He kept telling  us that he was dying; we kept telling him that he was too young to be so depressed.  And then, he died.  Watching Magic Johnson these days it's easy to forget that, before dollars were spent on research, the virus ran unchecked through the gay community, and it was a death sentence.  Tony Kushner's words brought it all back, in a rush.

I don't know if I'd have ventured to see it someplace else, as a stand alone piece.  Those around me echoed the sentiment.  It was the first play in the 2016-17 season; we all had season tickets so we swallowed our reservations and took our seats.  Scarlett wanted to leave after the first act; it was painful.  The second act was intense, the third necessary to see what happened, and now she's sad because she'll be out of town in early October when they do a reading of Perestroika, the second and final part.

The passage of time hasn't dimmed the horror.  And that, I think, is a good thing.  It's good to be reminded that sometimes the government has to get over its reluctance to step into a messy situation and must act to save the vulnerable among us.  It's good to be reminded that politics has always had an inherently unsavory side.  It's good to see the consequences of hiding in plain sight, of self-castigation, of longing and of loss.  It's not easy, but it's necessary.

That, I think, might be a definition of art.