Sweet and Lucky

DCPA Off Center

Sweet and Lucky

Immersive theater plunges one into the midst of the theatrical action rather than keeping one at a distance.    The fourth wall is not just breached, it is exploded.    The theater goer is in the middle of the action.  It unfurls around one and the audience may even interact with the performers.    The audience is quite literally in the play.

I have had the opportunity to attend three such events as presented through the Off Center arm of the DCPA.   Each has been unique.   The first one I attended was called Sweet and Lucky.    In the case of this production, each member of the audience has quite literally a different journey through the experience.   At times I was with groups as large as eighteen and as small as just myself.   The experience of Sweet and Lucky was to see the memories of a woman with an Alzheimer like disease.   Upon arrival each audience member was given an umbrella.  Upon entry into the playing space, we arrived at the woman’s funeral on rainy day.   The umbrellas were absolutely needed to protect us from real water falling from the sky.   We were immediately immersed in the experience.     After the funeral, the audience was divided into thirds.  Each third would follow a different actress portraying the same woman.   We were then further divided in half.  We then proceed to experience the woman’s life in various ways.   

As we moved from area to area we encountered her and her husband at various stages of their lives from their courtship at a pond to celebrating Christmas to having a child to her being institutionalized.   In every instance, we could see her struggling with the loss of her memories.    At other times we were plunged inside her head to witness her memory at work.   In all cases we were part of the story, interacting with the characters in a variety of ways.   We helped the woman’s daughter make cookies using her mother’s old recipe.  We helped her grandson sort through knickknacks in the attic, looking for anything special.    We played memory games with a man jumping round a room full of filing cabinets piled floor to ceiling in what could only be a representation of her failing memory center desperately trying to find and make sense of the fragments of memory left to her.    When we encountered the woman in the institution, I became her grandson and she interacted with me as such.  My Mom became someone she thought had died.   

Each audience member even had a one-on one interaction with one performer.  Mine was the grandson.   I was escorted to a small room and left by myself.  Just at the time I was beginning to feel like I had been forgotten, another door open edand I was greeted by the grandson and taken into a space that resembled a pond at night.   I was asked to look up at the sky and talk about what I saw there.  It was my turn to share memories.   

By the time the show was over, we had experienced the life of this woman in every way from experiencing it as it was happening to being inside her brain trying to remember it, to sharing the memories of her relatives after she had died.   Because this was about memory and memory is never linear the order we experienced events was not in chronological order and not experienced in exactly the same order by any two people.   Ultimately, Sweet and Lucky was about the nature of memory.   

The performers were all beyond excellent. Because they had to interact directly with the audience, they had to be prepared for anything as they could not know how any individual audience member would respond to being talked to and asked to do things by the performers.    All the while, they had to maintain character, no matter what happened.  The timing of the experience had to be perfect.   They had to be sure that each person was in the right place at the right time to experience the journey, both audience and performer.   Given that there were something like 54 people going through the experience and that each one at one point had a one-one-one there could be no room for error.  Otherwise, any audience member might end up placed in the wrong group and see events they had experienced before.   Any delay and the whole process would fall apart as my group would complete an event and move forward to an event that was just being completed by another group while a group behind my group was beginning the event I had just finished.  The choreography that went into organizing and making all this happen was nothing short of amazing.    

Sweet and Lucky was an exhilarating and profound event that I am only fully coming to understand a year later.   It was truly genius from set and costume design to the execution of the event to stellar performances, we spent two hours fully immersed in and active participants in this woman’s world and her memories.   I know this because I still remember it as if I saw it yesterday and still think about its impact all the time.  I think of both my grandmothers.  For my Dad’s mother, memory became her window to the world as her eyesight faded.   The most important thing to her became remembering each of her family member’s birthdays.    The past became more important to her than the present.  My Mom’s mother had Parkinson’s disease that slowly stole her memories.   It was hard to watch the woman that she had been disappear as her memories left her.  Sweet and Lucky reminded me of how fragile and beautiful a thing memory can be, the joy when memories are made and the pain when they are lost.