Melissa Lorraine and Hank Hilbert in “I Am the Wind” at Theatre Y/Photo: Karl Soderstrom
RECOMMENDED
In the boat of Jon Fosse’s “I Am the Wind,” words and experience don’t have to line up in the way the world expects. Words can sometimes give weight to life that is otherwise light, like silence is. Still, we can’t understand each without words, not entirely, and so we become heavy with them together. How frightening to see the abyss swing wide to you when it has been yawning in another’s eyes as long as they can remember. To hear it spoken aloud, the fear of making oneself nothing: becoming silence.
“I Am the Wind” is both a sea voyage taken by two characters and a metaphor for life’s voyage. Two Bergman-esque character-symbols named the One and the Other stand perilously on matching driftwood planks that nearly touch at one end and are suspended from the ceiling by thick ropes, evoking something like a skyscraper scaffold and embodying mortality’s tightrope. The planks in some ways symbolize the style of the play’s scripted lines: parallel, in two voices, only at times intersecting, otherwise swaying, drifting or swinging near and around one another, at all times threatening to slip or jump into the waves.
This play is a poem for two voices in meditation on the fragility of life. Like an erasure of Samuel Beckett that leaves the white spaces, Theatre Y’s production is most interesting when it doesn’t attempt to push its words to “mean something existential.” Both text and production are self-aware, sometimes humorous, and excellently handle the balance between relatability and the avant-garde. The One and the Other, intrepidly played by Hank Hilbert and Melissa Lorraine, respectively, are canvases on which to imagine ourselves. In the best moments, the pair’s words—by virtue of being words that cannot become the exact shapes of experience—just are, and we the audience drift among their ambiguity.
Melissa Lorraine and Hank Hilbert in “I Am the Wind” at Theatre Y/Photo: Karl Soderstrom
Many of these moments are spare. Even the word “yes,” all alone, which is spoken 295 times in the play, according to director Evan Hill’s program note, becomes an affirmation of existence. Its opposite, which is not really “no” but is silence, represents both the unknowable and the unspeakable. A poet’s attention to negative space suffuses the script and Hill’s direction of it. The magic of the stage’s sparseness makes moments of intimate connection that much more noticeable and the significance of props that materialize from nowhere more textural. When the actors are really among the words with each other, particularly in close proximity, they immerse. There’s a moment further into the play when the two become so joyous at the mere thought that “life’s not all bad—there’s food” that we smile, forgetting the previous scene’s literally stormy bout of ennui.
The play doesn’t let us rest easy. The actors’ mutual trust makes parts almost comfortable at times (disturbingly so, in hindsight). In some moments, especially with Lorraine, every emotion cycles through her body as if she were an extruder. We can see her physical struggle, in the sense of grappling with existence, while expressing the text. As a result, the finale of this play is vibrantly exhausting for actor and audience alike. The cycle of grief is manifest in screaming for the One we just lost, then steering the boat, then searching for the lighthouse; screaming, steering, searching; and on, waves cycling.
There are moments in which the breath expelled from the actors is too much for the senses. In early scenes, Hilbert’s sudden, reactive shouts and tendencies for unmotivated movement pull focus, and the dynamics go off-kilter. Overmuch intensity is poured into certain dramatic actions that stretch the text in a way that feels less like the play’s shape and more like the team pushing it to do something it doesn’t want to do. There are also some very literal sound effects that push against the play’s importantly thin veil and threaten to tear it.
However, the production is so still and delicate that these puncture moments remind you of how whisper-fine the rest of it has been and how deeply you’ve felt everything throughout. The slightest breath ruffles the fabric; the faintest echo reminds you that you’re experiencing life in all its precarity.
Hank Hilbert and Melissa Lorraine in “I Am the Wind” at Theatre Y/Photo: Karl Soderstrom
It’s only near the end of “I Am the Wind” that the memory play’s structure becomes evident. The space is now charged with what remains of the One, and when the lights drop, it’s hard to applaud. The air feels thick: fogged, heavy breathing, grief-thick. Leaving the theater, I heard a few people agreeing that, yes, that was what it must feel like to experience that. For someone who’s lost a person to that, it must feel that way: impossible to put into words, language giving nothing that makes it—life or death—make sense. Yes. For someone who’s attempted it, that must feel as fragmented, as rocking, as a boat on waves. There must be moments of clarity brightened by good food, laughter, a calm cove. Between those moments are stones: heavy, sinking moments when the ocean floor rises to meet you.
It must be like that.
Yes.
The play is, in a word, haunting, in the way an echo haunts from down an empty hall. Staring into that normally familiar abyss, the boards you’ve trodden day in and out with no thought, a slight, new sound chills your perception. You overthink the shadows. Did you consider it? she asks. I consider it every day, he answers. Yes, she replies. Why did you do it? she demands.
The echo, from down the hall. “A couple of sideways steps and we don’t exist any longer.”
We are nothing but what’s left of our voices in others’ memories.
“I Am the Wind” at Theatre Y, 3611 West Cermak, through November 1.
