"Site-Specific Event" by Sandbox Collective

It always starts with a link. And even with my recent entrance into the community, I know that this is the most special version of finding out about a creative event. Like being handed a handwritten invitation held with a wax seal. Amanda told me a place and time, and told me to bring something for the snack table. Clicking through, I found that my choice of dates and times to attend was far from intimate. Shit, this thing has a waitlist? 

Here’s the thing about me. I often find myself walking into situations knowing extremely little. I’d skimmed the description for “Site-Specific Event” beforehand, and vaguely understood that I’d be seeing a play put on in an apartment. Not unheard of, I’d seen other indie ensembles put on DIY shows and had appreciated the concept that the venue would be more intimate. The walls were green. The carpets had been vacuumed and a Scott Pilgrim record turned on an upscale Crosley. I’d assumed who would be in performance, given that I’d seen a few of the same faces in other Sandbox projects Richard II and Bimboification. But I didn’t know, you know?

Being unsure basically shook out into one moment complimenting the host on her apartment and the next, her moving before I could see where she was going, only to come back through the front door as a completely different person, though her appearance hadn’t changed. That’s just what “Site-Specific Event” was like. Actors would come in and out of character, addressing the audience as desired, twisting our notions of reality by, for example, mentioning their own roles in the performance. They would come into a room, interrupting another scene and then run out of it and start another scene, in another room. Easily dividing the audience, party-goers would look around sheepishly and follow while others would stay behind because something else had just started happening. And more and more, I was glad that I had come in knowing nothing and avoiding all opportunities of finding out the context for myself. If any context was given, it was few and far between. But as we trickled between or down dark walkways or were directed to sit or follow, less of a plot and more of a dynamic came together. 

A writer presents his girlfriend in a one-woman show in his apartment to his sister and her girlfriend, both high in the art world. We quickly feel a sibling rivalry,  an attraction between the siblings’ lovers, unrequited love creating a polygon of relationships. Commitments are broken, plays within plays are interrupted and characters are disrespected. The audience is challenged to choose which story they want to give attention to, and more than once I was watching a conversation in one room and heard a screaming match on the other side of the apartment, totally unrelated to the moment unfolding in front of me. Motivations mismatch and threats emerge, or victims, depending on how you had viewed the scenes and in what order.

I preach often to all current and potential theatre-goers the superiority of smaller-scale productions, usually experienced in the form of black box venues. But “Site-Specific Event” used what makes those kind of shows great and took it much further. What has always stood out to me about these kind of productions is that the performing talents of the actors are truly exposed, leading a good actor to shine like the sun and a poor one to fall flat. The night I saw “Site Specific Event”, I was astounded to experience the amount of control and professionalism of these actors. Realistic dialogue, big reactions to small events, their relationship to the space… I was left boggling on how long this must have taken to execute and rehearse, especially amid rumors that no blocking had been set. Easter eggs disguised as apartment décor turned out to be props. The effort of preparation even came to a point in the performance in which four separate actors holding separate conversations with audience members in separate areas of the apartment would join their lines in unison, then continue their own rant, then come back together in chorus, like the lines were waves pulling back and forth from the shore. Every moment like eavesdropping on a private conversation if it were well-written. The actors’ humble nonchalance in receiving praise on the finished product made it even more infuriatingly well-crafted.

The production ended with no pomp, more a rejection of it. No curtain call, bows, acknowledgment to the tech booth. They told us the play was over, and it was. The actors reappeared out of nowhere and the characters who had been taking up the space just moments before were gone without warning. I was informed that the play had been an adaptation of Aaron Posner’s “Stupid Fucking Bird”, which is itself an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull”. I expressed the appropriate level of reverence to the cast and excused myself, not wanting to be the audience member that the house manager (LOL) wants to get rid of. As I ventured out into the sidestreets hoping my bike light was bright enough, I wondered with no real direction how far the play extended out into the world. I wondered about actors, about where their character ends and their self begins. I wondered if they wondered the same thing. I thought again and again about the little details of the art piece I’d just been immersed in, of the. constructed reality of it. Where did the play end and the real world begin? I found myself thinking jokingly that one of the actors would pop out at me from a dark shadow on Ravenswood Ave. and begin another scene. After all, they had broken the fourth wall and distorted the lines of make-believe and performance enough to leave me unsure of the truth. I doubted everything. I doubted who was a plant and who wasn’t, what was scripted or unscripted, even from members not in the immediate cast.  An actor at one point had asked the room’s audience a question in character, to which another character interrupted, “They won’t answer you. They know you’re fictional.” In a monologue, another character ranted about both the character opposite him and about the actor playing them within the same breath. My mind has not strayex from the performance and I yearn to shirk responsibilities to enjoy it again to see the pieces of the narrative that I missed. Perhaps the most barefaced sign of approval I could give came the next day in the form of begging one of the cast members for a show extension. I regret nothing.

Posner, Aaron. Stupid Fucking Bird, 2013 Stageplay.

Chekhov, Anton. The Seagull, 1896 Stageplay.

This production of Site-Specific Event premiered in Chicago, directed by Audrey Napoli, starring the Sandbox Theatre Collective ensemble.