By Mary Tuomanen
A friendly young man in a distinctly 1980s mustache speaks to an unmanned, distinctly 1980s camera. He is smiling, vulnerable. He sings a goodbye song to someone he loved, someone who was taken by the AIDS epidemic. He rescues his love from being a statistic by telling stories about him, making him flesh again through memory. He sings, “Stood on the tracks/ hoping you’d come back/ left my heart in Washington….”
Watching the young man in the 1980s mustache is a queer kid in a distinctly 2014 hoodie, hands in pockets, inscrutable. Something passes between them.
This is Applied Mechanics’ new show, This Is On Record.
The beautiful and scary thing about writing a play with 9 other people is that you never know what you’re going to get. We started dreaming about this show over 4 years ago. We knew we wanted to make a show that had different decades living simultaneously onstage, that was the jumping off point. I never could have imagined the incredible thing that This Is On Record, the show appropriately premieres in Pride Month, has become.
When we conceptualized this piece about Cultural Narrative and Media through History, we could not have known how intimate, painful, and gorgeous a piece could come out of such apparently dry subject matter. But the fact is, there is something uncanny about the future and past reaching for each other. The timeline of our show spans 50 years, beginning in 1968, appropriate as we hit the anniversary of King and Bobby Kennedy’s death’s this summer. Some parts of the story that America told about itself at that time are painfully familiar: police brutality, income inequality, racism, constant war. But the way we tell that story has, in some small ways, evolved for the better. The multiplicity of narratives that are facilitated by a heretofore Free Internet (struck down just yesterday by a delay of the House vote on Net Neutrality Repeal) made it possible for marginalized folks to reach out for others like them, and compile alternative visions of history. We see Daniel Park’s 2014 queer character reframing the dominant narrative as he discovers ancestors like the tender young man with the 80s moustache, who smiles as he sings, “What are we gonna do now/ who do we call on?”
Two of the characters in This Is On Record are related to one another. We see Anita Holland’s character pregnant with Brett Robinson’s character in 1968. In 1988, we see them together as mother and adult daughter. We watch a character who lived through the radical turmoil of the 60s witness her daughter finding her own way to speak truth to power, and being terrified. All the bravery she carried in her youth translates to abject fear at the prospect of harm coming to her child. There is a sharp edge of vulnerability to her motherly advice, you hear behind her words the broken record of “I love you please be safe I love you please be safe.” How to raise bold, liberated children in such a scary world?
This Is On Record takes stock of the half-century since King’s dream in a tender, beautiful way. Because the show is immersive, the audience has the privilege of wandering through time, standing outside of the flow of events to connect the strands of story and struggle between characters in 1968, 1988 and 2014. We see that these people are, indeed, the heroes they are looking for.
As a company member, this is my first time being a writer/creator and not a performer in an Applied Mechanics show. It was an amazing privilege to stand outside and watch the piece in Thursday’s rehearsal. I found myself picking up the pieces of my heart and thinking about all the inheritance we get and don’t get from previous generations: a treasure map without a legend, a message without a decoder ring. Old information, fears and hopes are running around in our cultural memory without its original context — in our language, in our DNA. But the beauty of This Is On Record is that it captures, paradoxically, everything that cannot be recorded. We see ourselves through the eyes of our elders. We watch connections made and lost, and love thicker than blood echoing down the decades. We hear a song faintly over the airwaves, and we tune ourselves to that frequency. Past and future long for each other, to be reassured that in all these battles, we are never alone.
This Is On Record premieres June 20th at The Glass Factory in Brewerytown. TICKETS HERE.