Grief As Fractal Art: ‘Agnosia’ (The NoPro Review)
LA’s Ceaseless Fun starts their season off with a duet for one
I’ve learned a lot about loss this past year. More than I’ve ever wanted to, but not quite as much as we all have to confront by the end.
For some reason grief and loss keeps coming around in immersive theatre in the Southland. I’m not talking about the haunts and horror shows here: those may deal with death but they don’t really deal with loss. Fear and grief might be cousins but they don’t really go well together.
Maybe it’s a function of the intimacy of the work: a temptation in the heart of the form to invite people into the experience of loss. To play the part of comforter in a time of need. A clear role that requires one to obey stricter laws: to just listen, because this isn’t about you. It’s about the bereaved.
This week I’m the bereaved, but that’s another story for another time. It’s just an ironic note to process as once again the fates have set me to attend a show about grief while I’m in the middle of losing someone. Before I shied away, not wanting to deal with what I suspected would be a series of shocks to the system. But the show in question now, Ceaseless Fun’s Agnosia, isn’t out to test my limits. Instead the production looks to explore perspective, and right now that’s something I could use.
Spoilers Ahead (Jump Ahead For Final Notes)
My experience of Agnosia (a term which means the inability to process sensory information — yes, I had to look it up) began with a long walk through an unfamiliar parking lot. I had been told that my guide was waiting for me under a basketball hoop. When I reached the appointed spot a woman (Emily Yetter) was waiting in a hoodie. She snapped to full awareness, as if she had been in some kind of reverie and asked me to stand next to her. She thanked me for coming, and began talking as one who had just suffered a loss. Her words were soft, and I had to lean in closer to hear her, my own thoughts ping-ponging off her words to land at memories of my own that were just hours old.
She led me away from the hoop and we walked together through a mild maze of live-work lofts. Steps away from one she stopped, and bid me to enter without her. There I found a man on a couch (Dakota Loesch) with his back turned to me. He too was grieving, and he made room for me to sit. Where she was delicate he was intense, their energy almost polar opposites of each other.
When she finally entered she asked me why I was sitting alone in the dark, which is when the scope of Agnosia became clear.
Both asked me to take their hand, and for the barest of seconds I tried to take both; but I had slipped mine into hers first and he spun away, dejected. She led me across the room, and their duet-at-a-distance began.
While Agnosia specifically asks you to remain quiet — a difficult task when you’re being asked compelling questions every few minutes — creator Derek Spencer has provided an avenue for agency. Just how the piece unfolds depends on the choices you make of who to follow from beat to beat. It is a tantalizingly clear mechanism that invites replay while allowing both of the performers to remain engaged through the meat of the piece.
One loss, two worlds. Our choices are the tool which reveals the details of the shattered relationship which has left two people straining over an impossible divide.
Yetter and Loesch have a dynamic that feeds off each other, even when they can’t directly acknowledge the other’s presence. The way that the piece plays their words off each other reminded me of a mixmaster keeping two turntables in flow: the strophe/anti-strophe of a Greek chorus in miniature. There is great precision here, with the Ceaseless Fun team hitting their stride in the one-on-one dynamic, which is a new form for them.
Final Notes
With Agnosia, the restless minds behind Ceaseless Fun have kicked off an authentic exploration of the human condition with their 2018 collection Outline of a Human. “Exploration of the human condition” can sound pretentious as all hell, but here I mean it sincerely. The aim of the series of happenings is to create a thematic through-line between three disparate pieces, and the company is already delivering something that is more meditative than narrative in nature. The structure of the cycle has more in common with a traditional theatrical season than the serialized efforts that have dominated immersive theatre here over the past few years.
This will allow the company to expand and contract capacity as the production requires, all without risking alienating potential audiences who “didn’t catch the first one.” Moreover, it will provide a fresh canvas for each show: room for Spencer, his co-producer Meredith Treinen (grief), and his returning collaborators to explore their voices.
It’s no secret that I believe in Spencer and the Ceaseless Fun crew, but that only means I expect more from him and his team than I would some company fresh out of CalArts or CSU Long Beach. The good news is: they delivered. The better news is: you’ve got a chance to see just what they’ve been up to.
Agnosia is playing through a sold-out run in Lincoln Heights, but an extension is likely. The next part of the Outline of a Human collection, They Who Saw the Deep, drops in May.
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