Dancing ‘Like Real People Do’ (The NoPro Review)
You and me and scopophilia in the park
Lauren (Katie Henly) and Oliver (Nicky Romaniello) are breaking up and I’m in the front row.
Well, actually, there’s eight of us there, witnessing it all.
A group of theatre-goers stand in silence in Washington Square Park, with arms folded and lips pursed. We’ve arranged ourselves in a protective semicircle around our two arguing lovers. The accusations come flying, with jagged, angry retorts returning just as fast — his unfinished novel, her need to tell him what to do, his failure to call his parents, his lack of culinary adventurousness.
Passersby stop but only for a brief moment. They listen to the raised voices, but almost always continue walking. They don’t get involved (New Yorkers never want to get involved). The uncomfortable silences are punctuated by the sonic bleed-in of everything else happening all around us on a sunny Sunday afternoon in New York City.
“Is this a play?”
An older gentleman wanders into our circle and interrupts the scene with his graceless question. He holds his iPhone up to take a photo of our strange tableau.
I’m the closest to him. I nod thrice quickly and whisper, “Yes.” Meanwhile, an a capella group sings something vaguely hymn-like in the distance. Readers with earbuds shielding them from the world bury their noses into their paperback books, while grinning children leap and holler on the jungle gym behind us. A small white dog, off leash, scurries by.
But Lauren? She’s long gone.
Only minutes earlier, I found myself running past a busboy, passed out on a bench on Stuyvesant Street. He snored softly as a young-looking medical student in his NYU lab whites looked on, perplexed at us for chasing a seemingly ordinary young woman.
We rush single file behind Lauren, dodging trash bags and sidewalk planters. She is moving fast, talking on the phone. She sends a flirty plea to Oliver, trading help driving a moving van for pizza. It’s a signal flare. But we hear only her half of the story; I catch only bits and pieces of her voice competing with the idling buses and rumbling car stereos of Manhattan.
She stops to peek into a toy store’s window display, smiling to herself, then closes her eyes. Her neck and arms are now moving in a quiet rhythm to her reverie, after planting Oliver’s voice to her ear through a tiny magic glass rectangle.
But that was the before, this is the now.
Against the backdrop of lower Manhattan, Like Real People Do melds both movement-based action with dialogue-based scenes and live music. With this work, Linked Dance Theatre takes the audience through the journey of Lauren & Oliver’s relationship: we start at a doughnut shop and then play the events at 10x, fast forwarding the two lovers from scene to scene to scene. It’s a highlights reel as we chase them (quite literally), rushing East to West as night falls.
The performers make an admirable effort to project clearly even though their lines can be difficult to hear against the din of the world; overall, the dance-based moments are more effective and progress the narrative much more efficiently.
The pair’s early dance scenes feel unexpected, as the characters climb on old fountains or scramble over subway structures, zipping in and out of pedestrian traffic. (Oliver, in particular, has a penchant for jaywalking at the last possible second, much to Lauren’s chagrin.) And the pair of ukelele buskers (Brenden Littlefield and Heidi Blair Clark) we coincidentally seem to keep running into only add to the show’s charm; you can see it on the faces of those who stumble upon the production by accident.
The wistful choreography turns tense and dark as the relationship begins to unravel. The ending moments are just as beautiful as the first ones, this time set against the twinkling lower Manhattan skyline, with the inky waters of the Hudson River only inches away.
And we, the audience, are following as observers along this emotional journey, through a territory filed with the landmines including but not limited to Why Can’t You Tell Me What’s Really Bothering You or Why Weren’t You Responding to My Messages and Who Is This Other Guy and Why Can’t You Let Me Live My Life My Own Way.
And yet, we yearn to place our guilty fingers on the worn map of nostalgia. We follow the old familiar pathways of mistakes and regrets, tracing the same lines and curves over and over. But the map is not the territory; it can never be the territory.
We know how this story ends, but still, we are enthralled.
Like Real People Do runs through October 6th. The production is outdoors but happens rain or shine; participants should be able to walk for up to 2 hours through lower Manhattan.
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