ANTE
The audience begins in a dark room. The walls, the floor, the ceiling are damp and soft, and the air hangs heavy with moisture. Somewhere far away, a low, dull thump sounds regularly. Does the audience remember how they arrived here? They can’t say. It’s too hot to remember. Hypnotic pulsing. Some of the spectators want to sit down, but the ground is just soft enough and just sticky enough to dissuade even the bravest so they remain standing, suspended in time.
At once, a revelation, a spotlight, a voice, a knife. “Cut your way out. Or stay.”
A murmur among the group.
Glances at glow-in-the-dark digital watches, sudden rememberings of commitments to lives outside.
A hand on the knife.
A gash in the wall.
Screaming.
Light. Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
No curtain. Just pain.
POST
A large sumptuous theatre. The velvet seats are filled with human skeletons. Each one has been carefully cleaned, no gore or crusty skin mar the perfect white bone. In the half-light, they almost glow. They have been preserved lovingly, the care evident in the meticulous wire joints, the attentive positions of the bones, the lack of dust.
Perfectly obliging, the skeletons sit in neat audience rows, no spaces empty, and grin charmingly at the stage. A ticket has been placed beneath the right hand of each patient spectator. At exactly 7:25pm, the lights gently lower then brighten to indicate that the audience better find their seats quickly. At 7:30pm, on the dot and without fail, the curtain rises.
Tonight, the performer is a young musician cradling a guitar. “How y’all doing tonight?” Warm silence. “This first song is about dirt. Well, here we go…” Gentle acoustic chords. Soulful singing. The sound of an air conditioner somewhere. And after the performance is done, the curtain falls. There is no intermission. Or maybe this is the intermission, the space between shows. The audience doesn’t mind much. This is exactly where they want to be.
MID
Actors do their best to blend in to the faceless glass city. They get desk jobs, they settle down, they raise families. They buy a house. They take out a mortgage. They die. It is all very American and very middle class. None of it is real. All of it is art.
“When did the performance begin? When did it end? Where can I buy tickets?” the audience asks. The box office representative is not sure. She is new.
Cut your way out or stay. The command might remind us of instructions from a horror movie with the Jigsaw Killer. You and your companions are trapped in a room, and you are given an ethical test that disguises the horror of psychological and physical torture. This is all the more troubling because it is unclear who makes the painful cut, whose hand grabs the knife and makes an incision in the murky membrane that surrounds this audience. And if we do not know who it is that cuts, we know even less who bleeds, who screams, who experiences the pain of this performance.
If the setting of act one reminds us of Saw, with its screaming, its blood, its gash in the wall, From Here to There’s second act appears less horrifying. The corpses in “Post” are pleasant, “charming”; they wait patiently and even enjoy themselves. Gabelmann imagines a period after death where the former self can simply relax, coolly listening to gentle folk music and smiling blissfully. This scene recalls a happier version of the meticulously painted, wooden puppet audience who stares motionless at the stage in Leonid Andreyev’s Symbolist drama Requiem (1917).
The amusing skeleton sequence of act two, however, takes on grimmer shadows in act three of From Here to There. Gabelmann’s final sequence is not without humor, but it is without bliss or transcendence. The performers here are many of us, blending in and disappearing – like a good actor into a role – into a faceless, meaningless life. It is a life in which everything is performed. “Mid” has no beginning and no end, and upon reflection one can see that this is true of all three acts of From Here to There. There is a terrifying repetitious quality to each of these pieces and the piece as a whole; it is as if one isn’t sure how one got involved in this life, but one must keep living it, wearing oneself out until it is over, dancing for an audience that isn’t even really paying attention.
From Here to There might be imagined as a Beckettian piece about the desperation of life’s brevity – They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more – but it makes even more sense as a Millennial portrait of terror. Adulting: it’s all very American and middle class. The painful, terrifying birth that forms the piece’s first act is an entry into blood and suffering. One disappears into a desk job in the faceless glass city and none of it is real. Repeat. The only rest imaginable is a retirement community of carefully cleaned skeletons listening to folk music and turning a rictus of contentment toward a stage with an uncertain, faltering performer.
But let us return to the roles of performer and audience that Andreyev’s twentieth-century play asks us to interrogate and that Gabelmann’s piece addresses for the twenty-first. If, in “Mid”, the actors are living lives and saddling themselves with debt, then who is the audience buying tickets? And who is this confused young woman running the box office? I suspect that the answer to this, too, can be found in the second act of From Here to There, and that the hesitant guitarist with the song about the soil and the confused would-be ticket-seller have a great deal in common. Indeed, it seems to me that both the musician and the box-office person find themselves faltering when faced with their audiences – a bit like one of the Jigsaw Killer’s victims as she tries to make a decision that might save her life. The confusion experienced by both of these figures as they address their separate choruses of faces is the lonely fear of not knowing what to do or how things work but being forced, all the same, to continue. It is the terror of being abandoned on a stage without a script – what theatre people call the actor’s nightmare – but still being asked to stand out from every other performer at the cattle call, every other person at the job interview. The box office manager looks at the theatre patrons and has no idea how to respond. The musician sings soulfully. But is it any good? Is it any different from anyone else? Is anyone even listening? The musician doesn’t know.