Asheville – This past weekend, I tumbled into 10 wildly different worlds, courtesy of the First Annual 369 Monologue and Short Play Festival, produced by Different Strokes Performing Arts Collective in Asheville, NC.
First, a little background about this reviewer. My brain consumes art. All art. Paintings, sculptures, plays, music, poetry, graffiti, interior design, architecture, and even fashion. No… especially fashion. My reaction to it all is visceral, synesthetic, and enveloping.
One of my earliest memories is of my sitting for hours in front of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute in Chicago.
If you’re unfamiliar with this piece, it’s done in a style called pointillism, where the artist paints small dots rather than using brush strokes. The painting is approximately 6 ½ feet by almost 10 feet… and it’s entirely created with tiny, colored dots.
I sat in front of that painting every week, usually for at least an hour, but often longer. My brain took in those dots while I sat entranced. Oblivious to everyone around me, I sat… and I consumed his creation.
Maybe that’s when my brain started filling in the spaces often found in art. The imperfect brush stroke. The missed chord. The wrong note. The plot hole. The lighting board glitch. The dropped line.
When I said that I “tumbled into” the shows this past weekend, it was with the same all-consuming sense of art that first captured me as a child in Chicago’s Art Institute.
The Three Six Nine Monologue and Short Play Festival was birthed by DSPAC creator and director, Stephanie Hickling Beckman. As she explains, it “features a curated selection of original pieces written by emerging Black Playwrights, primarily from our emerging Black Playwright’s program, A Different Myth. Join us for nine evenings of heart-warming, dramatic, funny, heart-breaking, and provocative short plays and monologues. Three Six Nine features represents 3 weekends, 6 short plays, and 9 monologues. No two weekends will be the same, and neither will you.”
My unique way of experiencing the creations of others has turned me into a “drywall mud audience member.”
I will seamlessly patch every error as I take it all in. Filling in the holes between Seurat’s dots as deftly as seasoned construction workers.
And I don’t mind it. I don’t see it as a flaw, more of an opportunity. A chance to be the one person in the audience who experiences the artist’s work exactly as they imagined it to be.
And yes, when I am enveloped by a play, I will vocally emote, openly weep, laugh more loudly than anyone thought previously possible, and be leaning so far forward in my seat at times that I’m surprised I’ve never handed a prop to an actor.
Being overwhelmed by so much art at the 369 Festival, collaboratively created by so many artists, I was grateful to be a person who really experiences theater.
It was absolutely magical for me. I say “magical,” not because it was a Fantasia-esque wonder. In fact, much of it was heart wrenching or uncomfortable.
It was magical because these actors, these stories… they took me out of my brain and directly into their worlds. From the “oh my god, my laugh is so loud in here” hilarity to the “yes, I just used my skirt to wipe tears from my face,” raw humanity.
It was as if the actors put me into a pinball machine. I ricocheted from emotion to emotion to emotion… and they kept surprising me with which direction they would send me next.
And I learned. I learned so much. Correction. I didn’t “learn” exactly.
It’s more that I was given the opportunity and the tools to learn. To re-examine my relationships and interactions of the past and, with that knowledge, make better, more mindful choices in the future.
I saw myself on that stage at times. Carrying my good intentions and the realities I thought I knew. And the person that I saw is not quite the person I want to be moving forward.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t feel preached to. I did not go home to my couch and berate myself for past missteps and mistakes.
I go into a theater expecting to be challenged. My desire is to be deeply and profoundly affected. In all honesty, I also go hoping that I will become a better version of myself because of the experiences art offers.
This past weekend, I was graciously given everything I wanted.
Editor’s Note: Barbie Angell is an award-winning poet, writer, actor, and artist. Her book of children’s poetry and illustrations, Roasting Questions, is endorsed by Rosanne Cash. She has also written sketches and plays, including “The Griffin Redux” for Montford Park Players’ Grimm’s Fairy Tales Show and her autobiographical, “Death By Sparkle: Or What Happens When You Drink Window Cleaner,” which will be produced by Magnetic Theatre.