My graduate class went to see Shadow Dreamer, a one-man performance. It was really storytelling, a man stood on stage and told his life story to the audience. After a few minutes, I really wanted to leave.
If you think of all the top 'Horrible Things That Can Happen To People' categories, he had them all checked off. Beaten, molested, switched families, new caretaker is schizophrenic, find out you're adopted, become homeless, find your family, they don't want you, raped, depression, HIV-all told in his lyrical Welsh accent. At each turn of the story I could feel the room hoping for good news, and then more bad news was delivered. The positive in his story was his discovery of his life passion, acting, and the success he has had in acting.
The unpleasant and disturbing content in itself is not why I wanted to leave; it was the context of performance. There is so much disturbing content in the world- my memories, other’s memories, newspaper stories, scary stories, homeless people on the train, the lives of some of the children I teach-that I do not want to take in more unless I really need to. I feel I have a limit and this stranger's story does not need to overflow it. It is the same reason why I will close my eyes during very visually disturbing images in a movie; I just don't want it inside me.
He said his mission was to get people to talk to teach other about the bad things that have happened to them, not to keep it a secret. I respect that and understand from experience how keeping secrets can poison families and relationships. My issue is in his solution. I did not feel better after the show, I did not feel like had learned a valuable lesson or had a meaningful experience. I think this would be different if he was a loved one of mine, and I would be sharing his burden and making it lighter, out of love. I felt imposed on to lighten his burden without a choice and without an exchange of love or understanding. When artists make artwork about terrible, personal experiences it is almost impossible to critique the art. During the Q&A I noticed people just asked him about his story, not about the life story as a performance. It is hard to say, “I don’t like your performance,” when you feel so bad about what someone has had to go through.
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