You Are Not Here
By Carol Burbank
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Four Neo-Futurist women set out to map personal and cultural transformations in “You Are Not Here.” The interwoven stories of Anita Loomis, Diana Slickman, Stephanie Shaw, and Rachel Claff take us on an inspiring and convoluted journey, as tales of fire, falling, failing, and fantasy blend together with the logic of dreams, leaving haunting afterimages. Each performer claims a corner of the stage in the tiny theater and remains there throughout the evening, telling her story with casual finesse–the style that makes Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind a Chicago original. Their personal, intricate, and often cryptic tales together take on a strange poetic intensity; the evening is a collage of striking images, whimsical confessions, and brutal vignettes despite uneven moments.
In addition to her usual ornate phrases and feminist retellings of fairy tales, Shaw offers a tribute to sword-and-sorcery novels and confesses her fear that the twins she’s carrying may have Down’s syndrome. And though she spends most of her performance tucked into a cozy-looking double bed center stage, per her doctor’s order, the piece is remarkably physical. She enters carrying a huge broadsword, assaulting invisible enemies accompanied by Enya’s generic Celtic anthems, stabbing at the air with brazen, ironic clumsiness. Then she sinks gratefully into bed, briefly exposing her cruelly stretched body when she changes into a Victorian-style nightgown and announcing that her “belly is a hollowed-out boulder full of soft bone and heavy syrup.” The life inside her seems a kind of death, though she’s obviously thrilled to be giving birth.
Perhaps the emotional impact of Claff’s prophecy is blunted by the way the group’s stories overlap. Still, I liked this approach overall, because it shows a community of storytellers each with her own brand of Neo-Futurist ironic self-exposure. Breaking each monologue into several stories mutes the excesses of each piece, building a different kind of energy. As each woman speaks, the others watch quietly, an intimate audience of friends. The lights shift, another performer takes over. Just as we’ve learned one rhythm, we move into another: falling, traveling, burning, sparring. The performers’ collaboration is as clear as their individual projects: Slickman’s straightforwardness makes Claff’s intensity more interesting; Loomis’s lesbian travelogue places Shaw’s heterosexual anxieties in a wider universe. Everything has that somehow practiced Neo-Futurist intimacy. The actors laugh at each other’s jokes and cue missed lines, creating a through line made up of their own playful, risky community.
