murmurs

I feel like I should probably say something about the play I saw last week with Mrs. Tuckersman, Murmurs, because it was one of the best plays I've seen.

I've been putting off saying anything because it is rather difficult to describe, but it was something like magic and puppetry with dancing, acrobatics, and slight-of-hand. It starred Charlie Chaplin's beautiful granddaughter, Aurelia, who is an astounding actress, puppeteer, and performer of other strange physical feats. She danced on a table with her feet in mugs. She was an aerial acrobat on a clothesline. She walked impossibly in midair. She was on the run from having to move out of a condemned building and the detritus and her boxes and packaging materials gave rise to living creatures and trap doors which led to faraway buildings, rooms of drunk and horrifying puppets and walls with eyes and a tiny tap dancing man. It felt dreamy in that bizarro way, like my head space when I'm falling asleep. It was the best and exactly what I wanted to see.       

What if objects could speak their own personal histories? What if walls could breathe our stories of disappointment and desires? Aurélia Thierrée arrives at Lincoln Center Festival this summer with Murmurs, a dreamlike, largely wordless rumination on a woman's adventure into a surreal and shifting landscape of deteriorating buildings and objects--a collaboration with her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin. Chased by faceless gray people, and alternately wooed and menaced by featured performers Magnus Jakobsson and Jamie Martinez, Thierrée enchants and delights in this wonderful spectacle of low-tech circus artistry, filled with visual trickery, fantastical monsters, and magical sleight of theatrical hand. Innovatively using set design and puppetry to transform everyday things--cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, umbrellas, ladders, and staircases to nowhere--into manifestations of the soul, Murmurs straddles the delicate line between imagination and madness.