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As exhilarating as solo shows can be, its hard not to fret over their current ubiquity.
Our theater-making climate is, more and more aggressively, demanding ultra-spare performances.
But no matter how sensitive we long to be, the truth is not automatically art.
And Pirnots particular way of theatricalizing whats true doesnt elevate it or crack it open for us.
In fact, it hardly seems to require our presence.
Not once inI Love You So Muchdo we see Pirnots face.
That implies that Pirnot never faces us because she literally cant.
Its simply too emotionally difficult.
If we were all to sneak silently out of the theater, would she notice?
Would it change the essence of her project?
Who is all of this for?
Theater can be therapeutic, but therapy-as-theater doesnt get a pass, based on its emotional tonnage alone.
Again, were in a brick box, stripped to its bare walls.
A first row of audience sits around it, another in higher seats around the periphery of the space.
Theres no melancholy muted trumpet whining in the air, but you hear one all the same.
(Which would make you, says starry-eyed Iras to their host, 139 years old.)
Last year she wanted to be called they, Finale tells us about Iras, shrugging with parental befuddlement.
I still dont get it.
And Im very liberal!
When we took out that Missing Person ad in the paper I said she was a she.
But this is an emergency!
… People might get confused.
If I said theywellpeople might think there are two kids missing.
He doesnt do natural, but he does do rooted, and deeply so.
What does it mean when a version of you thats not you achieves immortality?
Whos draining whose blood?
AsTheda Barabuilds to its theatrical coup, it provides no solid answers.
