The Importance of Memories

(Photo credit to Johanna Austin.)

Sometimes, beautiful plays pop up when you least expect them to.  When I read the description of A Summer Day, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect.  The description was a little vague, and it didn’t give me much of an idea of what the play was about.  But after seeing the show, I’m sort of glad they didn’t give me too much there.  I got to just sort of…experience it, and really concentrate on what was happening onstage without thinking about pre-show expectations.  And what was happening onstage was absolutely captivating.  A Summer Day was one of those shows where I didn’t even want to blink in case I missed something.

On the surface, A Summer Day was a simple play.  There wasn’t a ton to the set or costumes.  Most of the characters didn’t have names.  Early on, it’s clear that a large part of this is just going to be storytelling.  But I really liked that, because once you really get into the show, it’s clear that there is absolutely nothing simple about this play.  Every last moment was rich with meaning.  It didn’t matter that there wasn’t much to the set or costumes or props.  The actors in this show brought so much meaning to it.  It was stunning.

The dialogue was one of my favorite parts of A Summer Day.  It was like poetry, in rhythm and words.  I was even more impressed by the fact that it was translated from Norwegian.  I do wonder what the original text is like, not that I know Norwegian, but I also imagine the translator did a good job with that.  I get the feeling it was pretty true to the original language and text, and the actors really brought it home.  The way they spoke the words was haunting.  The way the older woman told the story was breathtaking.  She was very much reliving a painful time in her past, and actor Krista Apple was stunning doing so.

Another one of the most striking things for me was watching the actors who played the older and younger counterparts.  They very much embodied each other…the older and younger women and friends were perfect echoes of each other.  I loved how they were mostly unknown to each other, but there were tiny moments where they were aware of each other, like where the older woman lays her hand on the younger woman’s knee.  It was a super interesting approach to a hard dynamic.

A Summer Day is so powerful in its simplicity.  It didn’t take much for the actors to bring so much to the audience.  The show was filled with raw emotion, and I felt all of that emotion bubbling up inside of me.  This show brings up everyone’s worst fear- losing the person you love the most.  Whether it’s emotionally or physically, it’s something we can all relate to on one level or another.  And A Summer Day really brought that home for me, and I’m sure pretty much everyone else in that theatre.  It was breathtaking.

This show is truly a show about human nature.  We see all that emotion, and all the things that are so deep inside of us.  Not just fear, but love and longing and the waiting.  It’s one of the things I absolutely adored about the play…we can all relate to these moments and emotions in one way or another.  Even if we can’t, which seems unlikely to me, we can appreciate them in someone’s story.  The older woman telling us this story, her story, brings so much to the surface.

It’s not just the fear of losing someone you love, though.  A Summer Day brings up a lot of archetypal fears and emotions.  There are fears we all have at some point in our lives- fear of the dark, fear of losing someone, waiting for someone, pretty much anything that brings up pain.  And A Summer Day brings up so many of these fears.  It’s something that hits you so hard while watching it.  The way we see both the younger versions of these characters and the older versions who have already lived this life reminds us of these fears.  It reminds us that they are a big deal now, and they never really go away, no matter how far removed you are from when they’re fresh.

Despite all of this, A Summer Day is truly a simple story.  It’s about love and loss and friendship and life.  I think it hits so hard because it’s a simple story.  There’s so much to it that goes back to the roots of everyone and everything.  There’s so much depth to it, and as the story continues, more and more layers are pulled back.  By the end, when we have the whole story, we’ve gotten to the very core of everything we’ve seen.

A Summer Day was short in time, but I think that’s a large part of what made it so poignant.  They didn’t need to make it long for us to get so much out of it.  In fact, I think it was the perfect amount of time for this story to be told and to hold us with a haunting after-feeling.  The blending of past and present was stunning, and the show was stunning.  I definitely walked away with many bubbling emotions, which I think is truly a testament to any play.