Katie Surrence: The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise

[Here’s Katie introducing herself for those who missed her first post. Enjoy! –SL]

I feel uncomfortable “reviewing” experimental theater. I’m not sure which of my values apply; I don’t have a core sense of what the important elements of good experimental theater are. But maybe I don’t have to be evaluative, exactly, and can just describe the show and the experience of watching it, even the experience of getting to it and sitting in the seat, which felt on this last occasion more than usual like part of the show. The play was The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, a translated work by Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada, that is running till July 3 at JACK theater in Brooklyn.

My friends told me they were going, but I waited until the last minute to buy my ticket and they were sold out. I had spent too much of the weekend pent up, and I nearly cried: “This is it. I am missing my life.” I hemmed and hawed about whether I would venture to Brooklyn on the offchance I could get in. An hour before the show, I decided: “I live in New York City. If I spend all my time grinding out my chem homework I am not sucking the marrow out of every day. I have to at least try.” I arrived the minute the play was to start, and I did manage to buy a student rush ticket, though not to sit with my friends. I was carrying an overstuffed backpack with my backpack and assorted school and work materials, a Duane Reade bag with some extra clothes, and a yoga mat, and I tripped over a bunch of legs and stuffed myself into my seat. Just as the play started I realized that I had made a fatal error in not putting the Duane Reade bag under my chair, and I had to stay very still for the 65-minute runtime in terror of disturbing anyone with a crinkle.

Then it turned out the play was about this, in a sense, about living in a big city and not knowing how to spend your time. A multiracial cast of five men and women rotate playing a couple, who are most of the time in separate reveries and only interact in a single scene. I wasn’t totally clear of the gender of the protagonists, or whether and when the perspective changed, but this authoritative source made it clear to me in retrospect: the actors play the man, then the perspective switches and they play the woman. The opening monologue by one of the male actors is a confession, which he stammers over a bit, and finally allows: “What I’m relating now, what’s going through my head, I have never told anyone before. It’s a secret, no one knows it. I will say what the secret is. I would like to have a better life.” One of the actresses takes up the thread: he’s having a dream that his girlfriend has died. It’s a beautiful dream, the kind that you don’t want to wake up from, because the nostalgia is so sweet. If he woke up to his live girlfriend, he would be heartbroken to have lost it. I thought of the recent Louie episode when the doctor tells Louie, “Misery is wasted on the miserable.” Louie’s pain is the good stuff, he says, the real thing to value about love, and the really depressing thing is not giving a shit.

Every passage in the play is a layer that can be cast as a fantasy by an actor beginning another monologue. It’s never clear when anyone is awake, or if anyone ever is. The characters are vexed by a feeling of wishing to be elsewhere, which seems in some instances like the seed of a vibrant impulse, a healthy desire to escape from a box, and in other instances like alienation from their lives, without any motive force toward something better. The woman attends a fantasy party she gets to by taking the subway far underground. She at first believes she’s dead, and she says in cocktail party chatter that her regret is that she wished she’d had a friend from another country, so she could hear them say how they loved the energy of Tokyo. Then she might have been able to feel a little bit of that sentiment too. These characters want to love or value something, to love a place or a person, but aren’t sure that the places they’re in or the people they’re with are what they can love and value. Since their expressions of longing take place while they might be asleep, we don’t know whether their waking selves have access to the sharp feeling that something is missing. Even the perverse escapist fantasy of wishing for your girlfriend’s death so you can miss her might be more awareness than this man has when he’s moving through his day. And there’s no answer to the question of how to wake up.

Occasionally this show was funny. Sometimes it managed to confront me with something I know I struggle with: the feeling that I’m doing something wrong with the time I have, that there’s another life a few shades fuller that I’m meant to be living and I either don’t have the people to do them with or I don’t have the time. My anxieties are slightly askew from these characters’. I have a characteristic New York dilemma: being so intent on fulfillment. that I reach a frantic energy. When I sat down next to my friend afterward for the talkback with the playwright, I whispered to him how embarrassed I was to be carrying so much stuff at the theater. He joked, “But see, you’re living a full life.” And all the stuff I had with me did reveal a certain level of activity, but that hardly erases the implicit challenge of this play: can you find a way to love and value where you are and who you’re with? Sometimes this play was boring, but in this particular instance the feeling of boredom felt thematically appropriate, and I could ask myself: can you tolerate a little bit of boredom in exchange for the other things this experience can give you?

During the talkback with the playwright, I asked him to comment on the title and the tagline “Youth is not the only thing that’s sonic.” Through his translator, he said that in Japan, there was a term “galapagosation”, which referred to the isolation of Japanese culture; the “tortoise” was the Japanese people. “I love Sonic Youth,” he said, “but it isn’t just youth that goes by fast. It’s all of life.” And then he told a fairy tale, which he said was very familiar in Japan that the tortoise in the title nods to, and is referred to in the play with the story of a woman who takes a subway ride down through the earth to attend a party. A man rescues a tortoise from attackers The tortoise invites the man to a beautiful undersea kingdom, and marries him to a princess. Eventually he becomes nostalgic for his old life, and returns home, only to find that 250 years have passed, and everyone he knows is dead. The most powerful part of this play for me was hearing that three line summary of a fairy tale, and it also managed to suffuse the play I’d just seen with more emotion than it had before. It’s terrifying to think you could just get distracted, and miss everything passing by.