Circle Mirror Transformation on stage

If you are an actor, or if you have ever taken an acting class, I am certain you will be hooked by literally the first word spoken in Circle Mirror Transformation, by Annie Baker, now playing at 12th Avenue Arts and produced by Strawberry Theatre Workshop. I know I was. It cracked me up, too.

The play is a comedy constructed around a six-session summer acting class. It’s led by fifty-something Marty. The students are Schultz, a carpenter, recently divorced; Theresa, a former actor, also recently split with her boyfriend and moved to Vermont to create a new future; Lauren, a high-school student with dreams; and James, Marty’s husband, also previously married.
The play is funny the way life is funny. When we put ourselves in corners and try to work our way out. When we don’t know what to say. When we say too much. When we learn something about ourselves only in the moment when we say it. I laughed a lot.
You learn about the characters' pasts, and possible futures, as they participate in acting exercises, often standing or sitting in a circle. One exercise uses story-telling. Each student – and Marty as well, tells a story from their life. Later, maybe several classes later, another one of the students tells the story back to the class as if they are the other person, mirroring them.
There is also the opportunity literally to see yourself in the walls of mirrors that make up the set. Just as in an acting classroom, or a dance studio or a gym, two of the walls of the set are floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Depending on where you sit, you may find your reflection down there on stage. Thanks to the versatility of the 12th Ave Arts space and the genius of the set design, it really works.
When I saw Baker’s The Antipodes, produced by Short Order Theatre Company (RIP) at the Slate Theater (RIP) in 2019 (RIP), I felt like I was right there in that boiler-room/conference room with those weirdos yearning to make the world’s greatest advertisement and swilling Lacroix.
It’s the same with this show. Even if the first word doesn’t hook you, the show reels you in. It’s the writing that does it. The dialogue is exactly the way people talk, with starts and stops, changes of tone and direction mid-sentence and sometimes even mid-word.
The staging does it too. It feels almost as if you are in the class. More than a few times, you will notice one of the characters eavesdropping along with you on two of the others, like you’re out there in the classroom and one of the characters is out in the audience. Again, mirrors.
But what about the plot? It’s not linear. There’s no hero's journey. Just ordinary people on their own life journey, which we find out about over time. I didn’t want to miss any of it. One hour into the show, I really had to pee. I never like to leave in the middle of a show, but on the very rare occasions when I can’t wait, I know I should be able to fill in the blanks, if it’s a traditional plot, when I get back. Oh, she had the baby, or they lost the battle, or they made it to New York, or whatever. But I felt like if I missed two minutes of this show, I’d miss one of the really special moments that had been happening all along. I waited!
The characters’ transformations begin fully to take shape in class number five in an exercise where each person writes a secret on a slip of paper, folds it up and hands it to Marty to be redistributed and read anonymously. But in this small group it’s pretty obvious whose secret is whose. By class number six, some changes have been made.
I’ll end at the beginning. When the show started, most of the audience didn’t really clock it. The actor playing Marty (we don’t know it’s Marty yet) enters the stage and sets up two folding chairs, writes something on the white board and so on. There was no light shift. There had been no pre-show speech. I don’t recall anything happening with sound. It was just Sarah Harlett going about Marty’s business. I think the audience thought it was someone from the stage crew. The effect was just exactly what it would be like if you were in that class, waiting for it to begin. You can’t help but get into it.
Final word: I was genuinely alarmed at how small the audience was on the night I saw it. It deserves a wide audience. It’s good.
(Photo from the X page People Selling Mirrors.)

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