It all started one day while undergoing a medical procedure. I watched the bridge of the CT scanner drift in and out of my gaze and thought, wow, I could tell the story of my life through all the things I’ve seen while lying on my back! And so it began.
From memories of my childhood attic bedroom and staring at its rafters, dreaming they were trapezes from which I could swing from one to the next; to then becoming that very trapeze artist who literally swung on rafters for a living, often lying on my back on a cold stage and staring at that same trapeze from below. From my mother’s bed to my child’s bed, from seedy motel beds to sterile hospital beds, from giving birth to confronting my own mortality—those views from below were all pivotal chapters in a life story.
It’s also fair to say I arrived at a certain age, a certain life experience, and a certain medical diagnosis, where I was feeling compelled to memoir. What started as an exercise on a page soon became something bigger. Wouldn’t it be more fitting to memoir in the same form I’ve been doing everything for the last 40 years, that is to say, a circus-theater-dance-musical hybrid?
Those are indeed a lot of hyphens to juggle (even if we are in the juggling business). The “directions for use” here are slightly different from any one of those forms, so let’s just say I invite you to receive the show with your left and right brains at once. Accompanying the literal narrative is physical, visual and acrobatic language, rich with metaphor, aiming to tell a fuller story from all its visceral angles than any one of those forms could on its own.
They say everyone in your dreams is you. The dreamlike quality of memory is in play here, and while the cast morphs in and out of various roles, they are all Herself, at different moments and eras—all representing the multitude of selves that are housed simultaneously in one single slanted-walled room.
Shana Carroll
The Attic Director
Scenes
Setting:
While ill in a hospital room, a woman instead chooses her childhood attic bedroom for her subconscious to reside. Memories of her lifetime conflate, collide and superimpose inside its slanted walls.
As she lies there on her back she can’t help but see her entire life through that same vantage point, that horizontal plane—while passive and immobile beneath a life that flies above her, or while herself doing the flying, witnessing said life from above.
A former circus trapeze artist, these memories of her past are filled with those of literal flight and acts of daring, all while confronting her disease: possibly her greatest act of daring yet. Through her trapeze past she finds the tools and courage to brave her current reality, and the ability to still fly through the air even when confined to a bed.
Act I
1. In The Great White Room
2. Flying Dream
3. Infancy
4. Childhood Bedroom
5. Prelude to Passion (I Want You 1)
6. Middle School Dance
7. Campfire
8. Chapiteau
9. Ode to Trapeze
10. Trois Trapèzes
11. Falling 1
12. International Cafe
13. Trapeze Lesson # 1: The Dead Spot
14. Shooting Stars
Act II
1. I Want You 2
2. The Anesthesiologist’s Face; Falling 2
3. Childless Mother
4. Trapeze Lesson # 2: Gonflette
5. In The Great White Room Part 2
6. Plot Twist
7. The C Word
8. CT Scanner; Falling 3
9. Trapeze Lesson # 3: Falling
10. Most Daring Act (Hospital Bed)
11. I Want You 3
12. Lattice
13. Faces
14. The Old Lady and the Sea
