Eavesdropping on The Newburge Family in ‘Say Something Bunny!’ (The NoPro Review)

Diving into a set of mysterious audio recordings from 1952–54

There’s always a house. On every street, in every neighborhood. Pick any small town or suburban enclave. There’s always a house. It’s the one with all the lights on. Conversation spilling out into the driveway because someone has left the front door open. Again. They’re letting all the warm air out. But we’re safe here, in this neighborhood, in this home, with all the lights on, and all your friends and all your family, together.

There’s a tangle of cars parked every which way against the curb. There’s music playing and people laughing. They’re trying not to annoy the neighbors, but it doesn’t really matter. Because the neighbors are also inside the house, trading gentle barbs and bad jokes while enjoying a slice of cake (homemade, of course). Over the course of the evening, tears are shed, songs are sung, hopes are dashed, and love is declared. There even might be a card game or two, later. Because it always takes twice as long to say goodbye as you think it’s going to after dinner at this particular house.

So: this house. Imagine it in the city of Windmere, on Long Island, in New York. It’s April 1952. The Newburge family is hosting a party and their oldest son, David, has an expensive new wire recorder (a bulky but delicate predecessor to a tape recorder). He wants to use it to record the guests at the party. Even if they don’t want to be recorded. People like their young neighbor, Bunny, who’s home from college for the weekend, visiting her folks. There are those who do want to be recorded, like David’s younger brother Larry, who he won’t let touch the fancy new machine. Or folks like Sam where it seems like he doesn’t have too much to offer David, save for useful advice on keeping one’s tobacco moist.

David records anyway. He captures overlapping conversations, gossip about a certain mother-in-law, recreations of advertising jingles, bad knock-knock jokes, dogs barking, and quotations from popular songs of the day — bits and pieces of sound that normally would have disappeared into the ether. But they don’t.

Instead, these spools of wire sit for decades, unplayed and unexamined, until the wire recorder winds up at an estate sale. And someone buys this useless, heavy, suitcase-sized broken audio recorder. And gives it to someone else. Who gives it to someone else. Who gives it to someone else.

And then, it somehow winds up in the hands of one Alison S. M. Kobayashi. Documentarian. Detective. Self-described “identity contortionist.” Conjurer of ghosts. An artist obsessed with found objects and creating works based on them.

Kobayashi receives the wire recorder and two mysterious spools with no labels. No notes. No names. No context. Just two hours of a family, talking, at different moments in time, friends and neighbors dipping in and out, multiple layers of simultaneous conversations that are sometimes hard to hear. And so: Kobayashi begins her search to figure out who these people are, how they’re connected, and what exactly happened to them.

The output of Kobayashi’s labors turns into the touching and witty Say Something Bunny!: a quirky, one-woman documentary re-enactment of the Newburge family’s story, with contextual commentary and costume changes, as the audience listens to the recordings in real time.

And as the family’s story unfolds, we discover who these people were (or at least who Kobayashi thinks they were), in the context of whatever she could find in her meticulous research over the course of the last few years. Together, we examine census documents, old LPs, yearbook pictures, alumni magazines, liner notes, newspaper articles, public marriage records, and more.

But wait, there’s more. There is singing. There are props. There are wigs. There is live video. The captivating Kobayashi happens also to be a time traveler and shapeshifter, who literally plays the part of every person who touches the Newburge family’s narrative, however briefly. She’s the telephone operator, and the census taker, and Liza Minelli, and even at one point, the family dog. The audience surrounds Kobayashi at a custom-built circular wooden table as she lovingly reincarnates the whole cast of characters: grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, the older son, the younger son, neighbors, and more. Each listener is armed with a transcript of the recordings in a mock “table read” to ensure they don’t get lost. The experience is surreal and feels completely original.

But alongside the fun and games, we slowly start to untangle the words we’re hearing into an ordinary life: struggles at school, friends moving away, the death of a parent, girlfriends past, a marriage that never came to be, success not achieved, and familial approval never given. And lastly, an estate sale and the real reason why we’re all sitting in a room, together, listening to these recordings.

A sadness comes over Say Something Bunny! as we, the audience, become emotionally entangled in this strange, funny, Jewish, so-very-New York family from the 1950’s. We come to realize the people we’re hearing so vividly, exist now only as recordings. But these typical, ordinary lives of the Newburge family feel extraordinarily real. Because it’s 1952 again and we are all piled inside in a cozy little house in Windmere, a place brightly lit and filled with love and warmth and music and cake. For a few brief hours, David and George and Juliette and Sam and Stella are all alive, resurrected by a stranger, one who cared enough about them to go digging far into the past, holding onto the ephemera they left behind.

We should all be so lucky.

Say Something Bunny! has been extended through January 2020. Tickets are $65.

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