Deb Margolin in 8 STOPS at Unexpected Stage Company Photo Credit: Lew Lorton & Warrren Von Uffel.
Unexpected Stage Company’s production of 8 STOPS, written and performed by Deb Margolin, tackles universal themes, but through a very personal experience of birth, illness, and above all, grief. Deb tells us early on “I seek the joy,” immediately clarifying that this is because “the suffering will find you.” It is not, however, a morbid show. There are plenty of laughs – some unexpected and surreal – and like any meditation on death, it is also a celebration of life.
Developed in part during the Dael Olandersmith Writing Residency, and Directed by Jay Wahl, this one-woman show pieces together moments of a detailed life, like travelling between the 8 stops on the underground in the parable Deb tells of meeting Death, a childlike figure, and from which the piece takes its title.
8 STOPS is an ambitious show on an intimate scale, sometimes tense, often rewarding, and repeatedly surprising.
“I suffer from the grief of endless compassion,” Deb Margolin’s character tells us, in an apparent contradiction that never seems contradictory, and which returns throughout. The show is a deeply personal meditation, and one wonders how far her character strays from her own story.
At last night’s show she invited her, now fully grown, son onto stage for a bow, and applause, suggesting that the intimate feeling evoked by 8 STOPS is perhaps in part because it reflects Deb Margolin’s real life experience. Her son, Ben, is a central character in the play, usually embodied by a small empty chair, to which Deb addresses answers to his existential anxiety, partly reflecting her own, and partly provoking new anxieties.
William T. Fleming’s set is rich and detailed, with a tremendous sense of space and character. The back wall is lined with objects from the full house of a life ‘well-lived’ in the suburbs of Montvale, New Jersey, while the performance space is shaped to exaggerate its own perspective, drawing us in, or allowing Deb to pull herself out from the stage. The dead leaves to the side of the performance space recall, perhaps, Deb’s childhood, and are a lovely colour, texture, and sound, though their dramatic intention and recurrence seemed more poetic than clear.
Wahl’s direction feels natural in combination with Deb’s performance style, and Christopher Mark Colucci’s sound design combines well with lights from Andrew Dodge, to sustain 90 minutes of story-telling without ever feeling overdone or drawn-out. The great pacing is a credit to both the writing and the creative team behind the show.
Deb’s performance was at its best when she was able to leave behind the script, held in her hands throughout, in the more confident sections of the text. She managed the difficulty of holding the pile of paper very well in general, but it still seemed to restrict her capacity for physical storytelling and gesture. She was particularly powerful declaiming “I’m raising children and this is the world,” in a mantra-like sequence that almost turns into performance poetry.
One of the Co-Producing Artistic Directors of the show, Christopher Goodrich, talks in the program of “language shaping existence into powerful memory,” which is a perfect description of Deb’s performance style. It never seeks the artifice of memory, a single constructed narrative, but rests instead on multiple fragments, colliding, recurring and eventually falling apart. It is the experience of memory, rather than its construction. 8 STOPS is an ambitious show on an intimate scale, sometimes tense, often rewarding, and repeatedly surprising.
Running Time: 90 minutes no intermission.
Advisory: Parental guidance recommended.
8 STOPS runs until July 31 at Randolph Road Theater, 4010 Randolph Road, Silver Spring, MD 20902. Tickets can be purchased by calling 800-838-3006 or online here.
