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I sat down next to Barbara Becker when all of us (Raymond, playwrights, actors, and directors) were meeting to discuss how Little Box would work. She was kind enough to move her papers and let me sit. I was struck by her genuine nature, she is a lovely person. She is also an attractive person who is quite fit. I was therefore surprised, after the Little Box meeting, to see her stand up and limp around: well, not just limp, it is a serious impediment. This brings us to her play.

As described by Becker herself in the Little Box description:

Ictus is a journey through a foreign country and through the world of catastrophic illness. An athletic, healthy, thirty-five year old woman experiences a severe stroke or brain attack while traveling through Italy on vacation. In seconds her life is derailed. Unable to speak or swallow and paralyzed she must find a way to put her life back together as she struggles through rehabilitation of her paralyzed body. The brain is the center of the self. How do you put your life back together if everything that makes you you is damaged or out of commission?

Ictus is derived from the Latin, icere “to strike with a weapon” and one can almost hear a warrior boasting, “I brought him down with one fell stroke…” such is what happened to Becker, as she ably demonstrates in her work.

The stroke happened while she was in Italy, far from any hospital. One of the daunting statements, and I hope I’m getting it right, is that a portion of your brain the size of a pea dies every 5 minutes that the brain is denied blood and oxygen. It was 5 hours before she got to a hospital that could treat her. As she notes in her play, “that’s a lot of peas.”

Thematically, the trip to Italy works very much in Becker’s favor, as does her constant use of Italian throughout. The trip to Italy and our trip through her stroke work off each other to show the foreign character of the experience: you are not in world that you know anymore; the things you took for granted are no longer things that you may assume, everything is foreign now.

Ictus stars Laurel Brooke Johnson who’s seen some movie and tv work. She does a fantastic job demonstrating the physical difficulties faced by Becker: walking, speaking, struggling to stand, etc. And does a compelling job demonstrating the anguish and frustration that surely must have dominated, and still must dominate, Becker’s daily life. Johnson also has a blog.

Structurally, the play presents a linear timeline of events that take up at least a year, from the trip’s promising start in Italy to her return home from the Cleveland Clinic. It is framed by a timeless space in which Johnson (Becker) examines five or six pairs of shoes set on chairs about the stage. These shoes are from her own life and represent events and stages of her life: running shoes she wore in marathons, dress shoes for various occasions, etc., all the phases of her past life: her once normal life. The final frame sees her in the same place: shoes all around, but this time a new pair have been added: the right shoe larger than the left (presumably for a brace). One thing I found neat was the physiological, if you will, examination of the shoes—the wear patterns—how these changed. It was done at both the beginning of the play and at the end. What was most striking was the final analysis where the pinky toe area of the right shoe is examined: it shows wear—where dragging it across a floor has caused excessive damage.

I am reminded here of my one time next door neighbor as a boy: Mike Stout. Mike had been impacted by polio as a boy and one of his legs (and subsequently his foot) was smaller than the other. He too had to purchase shoes of the same style but in different sizes for each foot. I always wondered at this. Wondered at how one would go about purchasing shoes in this way: did he have a special shoe store that he went to? Or did he have to explain at every store why he wanted to break apart a perfectly good pair? Or did he have to buy two pairs, knowing he would never use two of the shoes?

I think the framing device works to great effect. I think the linear portion works fine, too, but at times it is a bit of a strain—as the audience member is going through highly narrated events in a point-by-point way. There is great potential for dead time here and, in fact, there are points that the piece drags—either the rhythm/pacing needs to be examined or something needs shortened. However, these faults are ably compensated in theatrical ways: for instance, a projector and screen is used as a visual aid to many segments that have the effect of adding energy to the piece. For instance, right after the stroke Becker is forced to write everything (as she cannot speak) and the projector shows, in tremulous scrawl, the words she puts on the pad of paper. There are other comic points, too: when they are testing her ability to recognize objects and emotions and she is asked “is this man happy or sad” and the projected picture is an absurd fellow with a smile that seems as much gas as genuine emotion. There are other elements of staging that add energy to the presentation as well.

Overall, I like this piece and I think Becker deserves a lot of credit for putting up what is extremely personal and her equally personal ruminations on the event. Her examination is insightful and elements are cautionary: value what you have. This is made more poignant, I think, by the fact that she is so young and this happened; yet the reality is that many of us will face something similar in our own lives—as aging and the decline of the body is a fact each of us faces.

So the staged reading has come and gone…

If you’d encountered me one 1/2 hour prior to the reading I’d have been a different person than when the reading began. The self that wrote the most recent post: sniveling and wringing and threatening to vomit was in attendance. I touted the opinion of Clyde Simon (who feels that readings should not be done with music stands), and yet, at the 1/2 hour mark wished for nothing more than a few music stands to stop the clumsy acting that was to be.

I feared because in the run up to the performance Clyde re-visited the first part of the script–a part that was last visited 10 days earlier. So, as I watched the actors stumble through this portion of my script I became increasingly aware that in xx amount of time the house would be filled with people watching the stumbling and incoherence I was seeing in front of me. In short, I doubted. It is fitting, for my name is Thomas. And, Thomas is the one who had to feel the wounds of Christ in order to believe. I felt the wounds and I panicked.

For some reason, however, at the moments leading up to the start, I calmed. I met with Mike Geither, who would moderate the post-reading conversation; and I saw Chris Johnston who was the ‘curator’ for Little Box, and somehow, between them, they calmed me: reassured me. I don’t know if it was that they had been there before and ‘felt’ my pain, or if it was that they instinctively trusted (more than I did) the writing that had gotten me there and knew that it would carry through.

Regardless, I knew as things started that I HAD to watch and that I HAD to participate–whatever the storm, I had to pass through it and come out the other side. I was not immune, I had to endure.

The first part of the play went very well. Far better than I could have imagined. This was the part that they rehearsed not an hour before and which led me to near panic. It went fast. It was well executed. It was firing on all pistons. It was funny. The whole in attendance laughed and moved with the piece. I was excited and confident. Then came the second half. The half that took 4.5 hours to get through last Sunday night. As I watched (and listened) I understood why it took 4.5 hours. It was redundant. It was didactic. Preachy. Long. Self-important. Tiresome. And so on and so on and so on. Actually, it wasn’t as bad as that–at least, in listening to others. But I was over-anxious and over-sensitized and overly aware of the flaws and demands that I was placing on people. But it was long. Remember how I mentioned in my most recent post that it was long? It was still long. Very long. My wife stated it bluntly; as did my mother who hedged. But more importantly, I knew. I knew it was long.

But, if the worst thing I can say is that I moderately bored a few people then…I’m down with that. And that, I think, is the case. The worst of it is that I made some people look at their watches–not all, just my in-laws. Okay, cheap shot. And some others too. And I’ll take that. After it was all said and done I was approached by actors I knew from the “community” and other playwrights and they said that it was solid. There was good writing there. And while a few told me that it was almost there and I just needed to focus on the play that I wanted to come out of it; I understood that there was much more good than there was bad; and that the whole point had been realized: this is a staged reading, and its purpose is to make you aware of what is right and identify what needs adjusting.

After that? Who knows, it may just be ready.