Every Place I Cry

Every Place I Cry was an improvised emo concert, whose direct-to-me marketing absolutely worked because I love Jess McKenna and Zach Reino (of the terrific Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast -- watch e.g. this live performance of "We Object to Fear").

It was great! I've appreciated the artists who have managed to set up the tech and broadcast live performances from social-distance-ville; it has broadened the variety of art available to me here in my house (and even in my city).

There were lots of little nods to the emo genre, familiar from middle and high school and possibly not even accessible to anyone of a different age or background, but... just... so... completely... delightful! to me. And kudos to them for their many consistent character choices (including emo artist names on each performer's Zoom byline), set dressing (crows! perched on everything! terrible shirts and hair!), and on-stage banter as if in an in-person venue, including ending the night with "thank you"s and "Be safe on your way back... to the other rooms of your house."

This post's theme word is heteroclite (n), "a person who is unconventional; a word that is unconventionally formed." Inventing an emo band is stereotyping heteroclites: curiously contradictory, but verbally delightful.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen is a recent Broadway musical, focused on themes of connectivity (digital, interpersonal) and isolation (same). See previously.

It continues to be a triumph of theater, an incredible and carefully-constructed mirror of reality which is so achingly accurate that it shakes its audience with their own feelings of isolation and desperate loneliness.

Plus I like music, and words.

D. and I saw it from excellent seats --- front center of the balcony --- and the perspective, the separation of audience from stage, completely vanished in the immediacy of the drama. It feels real, it feels like watching reality, and actual interactions between characters with the depth and conflicts of real people.

It still made me cry; there were pauses in the action where, in the silence between lines, the sound of the entire audience softly weeping could be heard. So I was not alone. (Major theme and repeated leitmotif: "you are not alone".) I liked having D. there to bounce theories and analyses around; he went a bit further than I did, finding a Greek-style framing device in the first and last scene, but who can blame him? I think a little analysis helps scab over the raw, shredded feelings that the musical elicits.

This post's theme word is bavardage (n), "chattering; gossip." The cacophony of bavardage that is surround-sound twitter/instagram/youtube/blogs is effectively overwhelming, whether staged or naturally experienced.

Dear Evan Hansen

This musical will forcibly draw tears from your tear ducts. It will wrench the feelings straight out of your heart and condense them on your face as salt water.

Evan Hansen (protagonist) is a high school senior, and socially anxious to a degree that projects out to the last seat in the theater. He has usual high school senior worries --- college applications, trying to make friends, talking to his crush --- and some unusual ones; when a classmate commits suicide, he finds himself drawn into an increasingly elaborate construction of a false past friendship, because it helps him form actual current friendships. But they're based on lies, so how real are they?

End synopsis.

The titular protagonist is achingly lonely and isolated, despite being surrounded by social media (figuratively "surrounded" in the usual psychological sense; literally "surrounded" in the staging, with screens projected everywhere). This highlights the now-trite observation that we are more interconnected (in terms of data transfer) and less connected (social constructs like friendship) nowadays.

I have a lot of thoughts about why this musical is so deeply affecting, and why it has its hooks in my mind so firmly, but they're not coherent and to some extent it's just: I'm wired this way, catchy music is catchy, the story feels both timely and realistic. No flying across the stage or magic, and the least-realistic part is perhaps that people break into coordinated song mid-conversation, but... let's posit that in my mind, this often happens anyway. So perhaps "realistic" is not as accurate as "realistic to the mental reality I inhabit", which: ditto for the ideas about isolation, connectivity, the endless rehashing of previous social interactions. (Though I think I carry them off with a lot less outwards anxiety than Evan.)

On the topic of mistakes made publicly and online --- which form the core of the spiraling-out-of-control plot --- I completely agree with Scott Alexander, who wrote that it's "bizarre that we dare to talk at all when we know every word we say is logged and the future may be less forgiving than the past."

It's not clear what will happen after the plot is over, in the world of Dear Evan Hansen, and somehow the plot is so catchy, the ideas explored are so deeply captivating, that my mind has never wondered over to the area of: hey, what happens after the curtain is lowered? I don't know and can't hypothesize; everything is so utterly messed-up, and there is no hope of redemption; if there is any moral at all, it's that we should all have a short memory for bad things and a long memory for good ones, and absolutely no engagement with social media at all.

... welcome to my personal blog! Wonder of wonders, irony of ironies.

This post's theme word is pudency (n), "modesty, bashfulness." Is it a social anxiety disorder or just a profusion of pudency?