By: Jon Behm
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North is just one of four women who relate their experiences of homelessness in Somewhere Else Mother, the brilliant new play written by Nicole Gurgel. The performance chronicles the stories of each of these women, which were culled from hours of interviews Gurgel undertook while working in a Twin Cities homeless shelter. While in the play actors replace these women, their depictions are so skillfully done that it’s entirely possible, for instance, to begin to believe that the Caucasian twenty-something Josie Scanlan is actually an African-American mother of five.
Equally impressive is the intertwining narrations, each a collection of soliloquies that form a story. These stories are not simply related to us from beginning to end, but as collections of events, thoughts and memories that come together to form a thread.
The stories are not pretty ones. Shelley McGillis was forcibly abducted and locked up for months. Alexis Darnell lost two children in an insurance fraud related fire that was set by her landlord. These are tales of drugs, murder and rape. Each woman has endured a life that, most likely, made more than a few in the audience squirm. What is compelling about these narratives though is that they aren’t just sob stories. While they have had terrible experiences, the women aren’t solely presented as victims. They are stalwart women who have fought and suffered all their adult lives. They are proud of their children’s grades. They make peanut butter sandwiches. They write poetry. In short, they are not so different from the rest of us.
This is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the play: by telling their stories it removes the boundaries between us and the people that we pity on the streets. It shows how any one of our live’s paths could have just as easily taken the same route, and that the road to homelessness isn’t necessarily one that is self-inflicted. In being drawn in by these women’s lives we are forced to recognize the human traits that inherently we all share—traits that we don’t generally see in our interactions with denizens of the street.
The men in the play aren’t exactly painted with the kindest brush. They are mostly shown to be drinkers, abusers and generally violent people. At one point, the women keep asking themselves, “Why do I think that I need a man in my life?” since generally men have only made them miserable. With their stories being true to life, it is hard to argue. The men in these women’s lives were not pleasant ones.
Along this theme, the play also seemed to emphasize the communion of these particular women, as well as women in general. While at the opening they are presented as completely isolated from one another, they gradually begin to come together on stage, interacting not only with the audience but with each other as well. Through skillful choreography and adept physical acting one can see a bond start to form between them. They also begin to narrate, not only their own stories, but anecdotes of womanhood and mothering. “Women are the earth,” they assert like a mantra.
What can be difficult to differentiate is if this bond is a human one, or one exclusively reserved to females. As a male in the audience, one can get the feeling of being an outsider looking in. This didn’t necessarily take away from my experience though, as the women’s stories by themselves are very human ones. However, it did make me question my own perception of women and the affinity of feminism that they possess.
Perhaps that was exactly what this moving drama was intended to do.
Intermedia Arts
Thursday August 9 at 10:00 PM
Location Info:
Intermedia Arts
Artist Info: Fringe Festival, Nicole Gurgel
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