Is It Thursday Yet?
That is the name of the show Kim and I went to last night at the La Jolla Playhouse. I have no compunction about using someone else’s title for my story title since I do not try to commercialize these stories and am simply following a path that has me telling my readers about things I find interesting. I found this play we went to unexpectedly interesting, and Kim found it unexpectedly moving. That strikes me as a fundamental difference between me and Kim. I am both interested and moved by things, but almost always default to the interesting. Kim goes the opposite way. She emotes and then considers. I consider and reconsider and that drives my feelings. When Kim joined the La Jolla Theater it was less to get discounted tickets to events we wanted to attend and more about supporting the local high-quality arts and perhaps to drive us to attend more theater since the membership comes with a certain number of tickets to events. When she asked me a week ago if I wanted to go to the theater on Sunday night, my knee-jerk reaction was to demur, but I asked what the show was before going negative on the trouble to attend. I have yet to get Sunday night out of the no-fly category when, in fact, Sunday nights should be good times for freeway driving and parking. She started by saying it was a one-woman show. That is generally a turn-off to me because the challenge for a one-person show to be interesting strikes me as high. That one person being a woman puts the added sense to me that I might end up in a menopausal-focused show or some such other female topic. But then Kim said that it was about autism spectrum disorder and the personal journey of the writer/performer of the show through the diagnosis and awareness that her life has been influenced by that disorder. Now THAT sounded interesting.
Autism and the Autism Spectrum Disorder are very complicated issues to unravel since it is all about the differences in how some people’s brains function. It is very difficult to contemplate a divergence in a pattern of thinking when it is not the pattern of thinking that you yourself employ. That’s a little bit like saying that you cannot understand what you cannot understand. But then, that is the whole point of having a show to try to explain autism and ASD, isn’t it? Sometimes when you cannot adequately define something verbally, you find that showing a picture of what you are trying to describe, breaks through and clarifies. This show tries to find just such a path. The author and performer, Jenn Freeman, is a young woman of some repute in modern dance circles. She is a dancer/choreographer who was diagnosed as having ASD just three years ago, when she was thirty years old and well into her dance career. The point of this relatively late-stage diagnosis is that it had provided Freeman with a context to help her explain her life and the things that she has struggled with on an undiagnosed basis for her whole life. What were inexplicable aspects of her existence were suddenly put into a context that could give her a better a handle on both understanding and strategizing solutions for her issues.
The show is a sort of mixed media presentation with one woman on stage who doesn’t speak directly to the audience, but does so occasionally indirectly either through contemporaneous video on monitors that are turned on at various times during the performance and that the audience can see, or through audio of her speaking to the audience when she is offstage (actually in a closed clothes closet that is technically still onstage). That sounds weirder than it is in the context of the show. On either side of the stage are two other “performers”, one who is a male drummer and percussionist who once or twice interacts physically with Jenn Freeman and the other is a female vocalist and special effects person who sits at a sound board on the back stage and provides sound effects and lyrics to some of the music and motions of Freeman’s dance. For instance, she uses whooshing sounds to impart to the audience when Freeman is making more dramatic dance maneuvers. This other performer also physically interacts with Freeman at one point in the show by allowing Freeman to carry her in various poses while she is vocalizing. The overall effect, along with the other videos from Freeman’s youthful home movies and several visuals with jumbles of words that pass by the screen and highlight certain ASD issues and feelings, is to tell a story in a non-traditional and non-verbal (other than the songs and the written words) manner of the process of thinking that Jenn Freeman says is going on in her head while she tries to interpret communications from others and pass communications onto others. It is all a sensory explosion of sorts.
When they hand out the Playbills to the audience, each attendee also is given a pair of earplugs should they need them for the various loud noises that are used at times during the performance. At first one thinks that is a gimmick to remind us and give us anticipation of the event that is before us. But as the show progresses and the noises begin, it is obvious why some people might go into sensory overload, a quite common symptom of ASD, while attending the show. We did not need the earplugs, but it becomes clear that if you are telling a story about how ASD-afflicted people process the world around them, you had better be prepared to give them some relief from some of your display mechanisms if you are pushing the boundaries of auditory and visual limits. You would not put a flashing light into the eyes of an epileptic, so why put booming noises into the ears of someone who is autistic.
One of the most interesting moments in the show is an early scene when, as a young woman, Jenn Freeman was invited to a large party with lots of people, music and dancing. This is a situation we have all encountered to various degrees and is not posed as unusual event in and of itself. In fact, it is posed as a normal part of a young person’s life, the sort of moment that many of us enjoy and consider fun and distracting from the hum-drum of normal working life. But to a person with ASD who has trouble processing different forms of communication and evaluating people and situations so as to know how best to communicate back, it is shown to be a daunting moment. I liken it to all the computations and processes needed in Apollo 11 to successfully land on the moon for the first time. Most of us would be overwhelmed by the task. And Jenn Freeman shows us that being dropped into the middle of a raucous party with people she may or may not know well is equally overwhelming. It is an eye-opener moment for us non-ASD sorts.
The other overall theme which comes through is how understandable it is that a person with ASD might come to the logical conclusion that dance as a medium of communication was simple and more expressive of what is in their soul than any other more verbal medium. One comes away from this wonderfully enriching show with a better understanding of what it means to be on the autistic spectrum and some sense of how variable it is and why it is called a spectrum. So, while it is only Tuesday here on the hilltop, I think it is safe to say that in retirement, time is nothing more than a spectrum and it is always acceptable and understandable to ask if it is Thursday yet.