THE WOMAN WHO KEPT GETTING STUCK
Nicole Hollander’s comic strip Sylvia has a character called the Woman Who Worries Too Much. Her worries are wildly creative–things like whether the breakdown of the ozone layer will affect the radicchio crop so that she won’t have a good source for vitamins. But in her chic dress and haircut she’s laughably distant from any real problems.
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Lauri Macklin worries a lot too, but she focuses on the big problems. In her autobiographical dance When She Was Little, She Used to Dance in the Living Room. Macklin represented her adolescence as a single, repeated motion of striking something–as if she were chained to Vulcan’s forge. Labyrinth, another solo, features an intricate costume from which Macklin unsuccessfully tries to extricate herself. Her recent larger-scale performance pieces have been less introspective, though they’re still dark hued: the subject of The Mountain is the dehumanization of the corporate world, and the title of Trouble Sleeping speaks for itself.
By casting Weglarz, who greatly resembles her, as the humorous and faithful friend, Macklin makes possible a remarkable illusion. The first time the woman gets stuck, the light slowly fades on her as another one comes up on her friend, who lies with her back to the audience–and Weglarz seems to become Macklin’s inner self. Macklin casts her nine-year-old son, Thiago Lima, in the third role, the part of the woman’s son. Lima enters bearing a plastic sword and scabbard and wearing a plastic breastplate, proclaiming “I am Hope. I am her hope, get it? It’s a big responsibility for someone so small, but I can do it.” Lima hams it up just the right amount, and gets shy and swallows his lines just the right amount. His naturalness in the role redeems its potential sentimentality.
