A List of Dates

Fight, Flight, and Freeze – The Agency Theater Collective

Hannah Tar’s one-person show centers around about dozen important dates in her life and how they all connect to each other. I’m not spoiling things by saying that several involve sexual assault and domestic violence, since they give a similar warning at the start of the show.

I will admit to a slight trepidation when I walked into the show. I have lost count of the number of sitcoms that put one of its characters in a little black box theater doing a one-person show that is pretentious or boring or both, and they aren’t getting that trope from nowhere. A show like this has a very short runway to land on, is what I’m saying. Too much or too little in a number of elements and the show can come off as too over produced to connect to or as just a list of terrible events to endure. Happily, I think this show succeeds on how well Tar keeps herself, and not just the things that have happened to her, at its center.

Tar has the timing and and instincts of a stand-up comedian and it served her well in this one hour piece. Even in a few places where a prop didn’t quite work right or a names got briefly crossed in the retelling, her reaction served to better connect her to the audience rather than the opposite. One of the most effective parts of the show for me is when she talked about the physical component of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how it literally rewires our brains and our fear responses. We tend to dismiss emotions as something that can be dismissed because they are not rational, but emotions have a physical component. Our brains make them and our bodies manifest those feelings, so when something changes our brains, it changes the emotions we have and how we process them, and the show did a very good job of tying that into the lived experience of her story.

I’ve talked before about my day job as someone who works with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, so I was also ready to keep this show at a bit of a distance, just to not feel like I was at work. Due to the skill and warmth of its performer, this show managed to bridge that distance for me. It was not just a story about trauma, it was the story of a woman to whom those things have happened. That distinction matters. The result is a show that feelings like Hannah coming to terms with what happened rather than let herself be defined exclusively by them.

Due to the subject matter, I think a lot of people may think this show is not for them. I understand that. But I don’t think that should stop you from seeing an honest piece of theater that, by the end, left me feeling better about the world than when I walked in.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented May 16-26 by The Agency Theater Collective at The Pendulum Space, 1803 W. Byron, Chicago.

Tickets can be purchased at https://dime.io/events/fight-flight-or-freeze.

Additional information about this and other area productions may be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.