By Eva Phillips
There is a particularly arresting moment in folkLAB’s newest production, Nicole Gallagher’s mija: one bitch’s tale, that for the sake of the integrity of the story, and to preserve the experience for future audiences, I can’t explicitly describe. Thankfully though, the specifics of what happens—a moment of pointed violence in an all-around violently volatile romantic relationship—aren’t particularly important for expressing what makes it so arresting. It is a feeling that proverbial stops us dead in our tracks: the feeling of being held hostage by the one person you often hope to trust, your romantic partner; the feeling of realizing your shared toxicity with another person has reached the point where violence and degradation are utterly banal; the feeling of being both deeply in a moment and yet completely removed and totally out of control. It not only arrests you, but haunts you throughout the remainder of the show.
Much of the triumph of Nicole Gallagher’s remarkably vulnerable one-woman, multimedia show hinges on her ability to communicate feeling in a way that disrupts and lingers (in the most productive way possible). In an exclusive viewing of the final dress rehearsal of mija on Tuesday evening, I was able to experience the rawness, the poignant tenseness, and the excitement of the provocative new work finding its legs.
Like many of folkLAB’s projects, mija essentially situates the audience in media res—we are in the middle of room that symbolizes the middle of Gallagher’s memory and consciousness; and we are thrust into Gallagher’s process of getting ready for her therapy appointment. As the audience, we function both as therapist and intimate participant, as Gallagher imparts the challenges of growing up perpetually seeking out a mother. She notes her fascination with and attachment to the P.D. Eastman classic “Are You My Mother?”, and explains how friends, partners, partners’ mothers etc. became conduits for mothers. “I spent my whole life trying to be someone’s child,” Gallagher notes.
This admission operates as a segue into the main event, so to speak, of mija: a series of memories and mental portraits of the meaningful (for better and for worse) people in Gallagher’s past that are re-enacted episodically through Gallagher embodying each individual. Guided and aided by totems associated with each individual—pulled from boxes labeled with each person’s name that are scattered about the stage stylized both to be Gallagher’s bedroom and mind—Gallagher reenacts pivotal incidents and interactions that impacted and shaped her sense of self and perception of her relationship to the external world. Through these visceral and often heart-wrenchingly sincere, the audiences experiences, much as a therapist would, how past, present and future coalesce to produce the overwhelming feeling of Gallagher’s essence.
mija’s multimedia incorporation is incredibly smart, as the confluence of media perfectly evokes the piecemeal labyrinth of memories and subconscious, and the scattered, myriad styles in which we retrieve and convey those memories. Though it at times feels as if we are missing critical dimensions of Gallagher’s personification in these reanimations of memories, there is a subtly profound nuance in what Gallagher is doing. Not only is embodying persons from her past an incredibly empowering act of reclamation and fierce solidification of selfhood, but this process strikingly resembles what so many of us go through in therapy sessions. More often than not, rather than being able to discuss our thoughts and our fraught emotions directly, we speak to therapists in terms of what others have said or done to us, or how we have observed events and interactions that have shaped or traumatized us. This sort of mimetic self-articulation is nuanced and powerful, and though the device of the therapy appointment that mija opens with could have been more prominent throughout, the ferociousness authenticity of Gallagher’s method and performance. Her approach is particularly effective in the reenactments of her deeply troubled relationship with her “first love,” and these scenes were overwhelmingly impactful and, in many ways, cathartic given my experience with uniquely toxic and abusive queer romantic relationships.
Gallagher’s piece is also a testament of sorts to the systemic erasure that marginalized folx are conditioned to believe is normal. By embodying persons in her life, Gallagher works to address the othering, degradations, and overall erasure that is so reprehensibly commonplace to marginalized individuals. As a queer, Latinx artist, Gallagher confronts both external hatred and aggressions, and the agonizing alienation and abuses that happen within one’s own community or identity. Gallagher’s proclamatory reclamation of the idea of “bitch” is all the more powerful then, as her journey allows for a more complex rumination and engagement with identity that encompasses all the elements of self that we are often taught to shirk.
mija is a powerful 75 minutes of exploratory art, one that plays with media, genre, and narration with genuine purpose and not for the sake of self-aggrandization. Gallagher’s use of verbatim theatre techniques, in which Director Ayne Terceira asked Gallagher specific questions and used her exact answers for the bulk of the script, allows for a stirring and unsettling experience. Moreover, it is a shining representation of the sort of theatre that and artistry that folkLAB aims to support—art that is in-progress; artists perfecting their voice and unique vision. Mija is at times challenging to sit through—and the show frequently references physical and emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and substance abuse—but absolutely worth experiencing and meditating upon.
Mija has a limited run through August 4th at The Terminal Building in the South Side. For tickets and more information, visit folkLAB’s site.
Categories: Archived Reviews