Real Magic

It takes me some time to know how a piece of art impacts me. I think I can't really know right after, or even the next day. I am struck by the moments that play in my subconscious, reverberating across all the other stimulus in my brain, continuing to play on me after a week or more has gone by.

I can't get it out of my head. The title. Real Magic. The piece was stuck in a loop. We want to believe that something different is possible. That magic is real, that this time things will be different.

The most simple is always the most profound. This piece of theater looped the same script over and over and over again. As an audience member I learned the game quickly - they're repeating the same failure over and over. They swap places but the script never changes. But even though I knew what they were doing, I was on the edge of my seat. Each time it repeated there were two parts of me that were chasing each other around in my chest - the part that believes in magic made me lean forward...this time she'll get it. She'll guess the right word. Maybe it'll all change!! And the part of me that deals with probability, that analyzes the information and makes a reasonable prediction...it will never change. The whole point is that it's pointless.

This absurd chicken-suit clad trio rotated on stage in front of us for two hours. It was about absurdity, failure, futility. It was about believing in magic anyway. Though the lights were bright, there was a laugh track, and grownups dancing in chicken suits, I think it was the most tragic piece of theater I have seen here in Berlin. I have tears in my eyes as I think of it. It was about wanting and believing in something more than anything else in the world. When Claire was on the chair guessing, she projected such bright, unadulterated hope. There was no trace of her former cynicism. Her repeated transformation from exhaustion and disillusionment to pure, child-like hope illuminated the real magic: we somehow manage to experience both despair and optimism even in the face of the absurd universe we inhabit.

The hope that somehow still filled the guessing of the word "money" even at the end is the tragedy, and the real magic. It is still with me, even though my brain is full to the brim with stimulus and stories and stage pictures.

I want to make real magic on stage. Art that is shocking in its simplicity and tragic in its optimism.