If you’re a reader of the blog, or a member of the RHE mailing list (or you’ve joined us at the show), you probably know that we’ve been following each Before Your Very Eyes performance with a discussion with the audience—a chance to ask questions, share opinions, and reflect on the piece. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been continually surprised and energized by each conversation. The responses to Before Your Very Eyes have been as varied and diverse as the audiences themselves—from inquiries into the impetus for the work, to comments on how the minimalist RHE style affects the telling of such an enormous story—to confrontations of the intense emotions that are often elicited by the piece. Last night’s talk was an especially dynamic one—and we wanted to share some of the many interesting thoughts that came up.

Last night’s audience had a lot to say about the play’s treatment of conspiracy theories:

“It made me very uncomfortable—and I loved the performance, I loved the style of the acting, I loved the quality of the writing—but it’s just…it’s uncomfortable to deal with. On the other hand I think maybe, 9 years later, it’s good to be feeling uncomfortable again. Maybe we’re getting a little too complacent, a little too forgetting. But I do have trouble with any sort of conspiracy theory, I’m just not sure how to juggle that in my own mind.”

“When you have a Band-aid on something, and you pull it off, and it feels raw again—that’s what this play did, because for 9 years we’ve been covering it, trying not to feel.”

“I was shocked. This play didn’t do the thing that I thought it would do. I thought it would be much more personal—which it was, in a sense, but it opened up these big questions about politics, about history—you’re asking me to reassess history, and I don’t know if I have the tools to reassess, and I don’t know that you’ve given me the tools to reassess, even though you’ve made me ask these questions.”

Ed (Before Your Very Eyes playwright and director) addressed the issue of taking on such “huge” subject matter, and such sensitive themes:

“I want to tell stories about you, in the seat, now. And I don’t know you, I just know that you’re human like me, and I kind of feel like, if it makes me stay up at night—and if I can help you ask these questions…”

“I have these thoughts that you’re talking about. Like: Ed, if you use 9/11, that’s huge. And I’ve had this discussion with playwright friends of mine, who started off by saying, ‘Ed, just put the play away, pick something different. Write about anything else. But this? No.’ I had someone say, write about the Holocaust, that’s far enough away. And I was like, I don’t want to write about something far enough away.”

And the audience rounded out our night with some great, insightful comments about the work:

“It was amazingly executed…It works so beautifully. The simplicity [in the acting] was illuminated throughout, in the direction, and in the writing.”

“The simpler you make it for yourself, the more complicated you make it for us.”

It was, as Ed put it, “kind of an intense talk.”  And we were so glad to have it.