Regally Blonde Episode VII Real Starvation

Author: Astri von Arbin Ahlander

This past summer, I read the writer David Shield's manifesto, "Reality Hunger," which argues in favor of contemporary society's ever increasing hunger for "the real," whether through non-fiction writing, documentary film, reality TV, etc. As individuals flooded on an hourly basis with narrative, we are expert readers, interpreters and storytellers. But with increasing uncertainty, inequality and dissatisfaction in the world, we're growing tired of fairy tales. And now we feel an overpowering desire to grab onto shared experiences, to real stories lived by real people. Drowning in a flood of fiction, there seems to be a new appetite for reality. Whatever "reality" is.

This weekend, I went to the production of When I Was a Child, directed by Ted Perry, a professor in the Film and Media Culture Program who has lived a life filled with intriguing stories. Coincidentally, Ted Perry was also in David Shield's workshop with me this summer, where we read and discussed the manifesto together. My thoughts traced back to our discussions as I sat in the Hepburn Zoo on Friday night and let myself be carried off into the world on stage. The production explored the idea of the memory of wartime childhood, and the style of the piece was as fragmented as the subject matter. The play was effective because it was based on a tangible reality, rooted in the experiences of the writers and director, but also of the cast. Rather than presenting a fictional story about a historical event and engaging our attention through a captivating narrative, the production, thanks to its highly interpretative, emotionally evocative and causally disarming strategy, momentarily transported us back to that reality, recreating it in real time as the show unfurled. The sense of entering into a moment of remembered time was heightened by the use of experimental videos projected onto the walls. The videos served simultaneously as a backdrop and as the central story, but most of all it grounded the performance in a musty reality. They served as a door ajar to a collection of memories, through which the audience was invited to peak, and perhaps to enter.

Last night, I was at a party when, as the clock drew upon the early morning hours, a game of spin the bottle was initiated. The communal desire to play a game belonging to the darkened closets and locked bedrooms of our middle school days fascinated me. As I watched the squealing crowd throw itself into the game with flushed anticipation, it struck me that this too is rooted in a hunger for the real. In the subconscious belief that by re-living a ritual experienced years ago we can, for an instant, recall that memory as a visceral re-telling of our past. Much like the emotional response to When I Was a Child, the game became a moment of personal history lived again in a communal forum. The game was not only a product of that particular night, but was trailing clouds of memory, each with their own individual connotations from the games of the players' past. Having had some less favorable spin-the-bottle incidents in the cloakroom of the New York Loyola School's basement in the mid-nineties, I chose to pull away from the game rather quickly. Suddenly, reality became a little bit too real.