Review: “A Day” with The Cherry Artists’ Collective
Featuring: Erica Steinhagen, Sylvie Yntema, Karl Gregory, Jahmar Ortiz
“A Day”, written by Gabrielle Chapdelaine and translated by Josephine George follows four everyday people as they struggle to get through 24 hours. A very simple premise for a show. Perhaps, some might say, too simple. However, it’s how Chapdelaine handles these 24 hours that make it so unique and so powerful.
So often theatre focuses on the extraordinary. What made “A Day” so profound and moving was its focus on the ordinary and how, that in itself, is often the most theatrical. “A Day” was just that, a day but as everyone knows, a day can often be just as much of a battle as any grand epic. We fight against our own thoughts and anxieties, our vices, nature, other people, all in the course of 24 hours, and then we have to get up and do it all over again. It’s a lot. Even more so since quarantine began, as many of us are now spending much more time with our own thoughts.
Suffice to say, this show produced a good amount of anxiety (in the best kind of way) because of how relatable each trial of the day was. I could feel the weight of every moment because I’ve felt it before. Perhaps, I felt it that very day. This collective feeling of anxiety gave the show a sense of unity. That we’re all in this together. We’re all just sitting in front of our screens screaming together.
With every Zoom production I see, people keep finding more and more ways to utilize the medium to make their art. In “A Day”, the actors are all in the same space yet they each get their own cubicle of a green screen so that they can be socially distanced from the other actors. Not only is it wonderful to feel the actors feeding off of real energy in the space, but the in-the-moment use of technology to switch between different screens and change their sizes and formatting, LIVE, was incredibly impressive. I hope to see more productions experimenting with this kind of live Zoom production in the future because “A Day” set a high bar.
As in most Zoom productions, “A Day” is very much an ensemble piece. We get snippets of each of the four characters’ stories and see them interact in a between-space, each feeding off of the anxieties and struggles of the other. As the show goes on we start to see the unwritten rules of this shared space (kind of a lovely irony that in a socially distanced show the story centers around a mutually shared space) and what happens when they are broken. These rules feel all too familiar, bringing to mind the daily sets of rules that we aggressively apply to ourselves as our own worst enemy.
The actors handled all of this incredibly well. Producing both moving individual performances as well as a very well-done ensemble. A stand out is Erica Steinhagen as Debs, the only person who attempts to escape the shared space. We see this build from the beginning and Steinhagen does a fantastic job of taking us through that journey.
Each moment in “A Day” feels fragmental. A piece of a much bigger whole, the entirety of which we never really get to see. Truly just “a day.” That’s what makes the piece so beautiful. It’s in the moment. It’s fleeting. It’s not trying to tell us the whole story because it doesn’t need to. Just one day. That’s it. That’s enough. “A Day” truly was a beautiful and very cathartic piece of theatre in a time where one day can feel like a lifetime.
“A Day” was written by Gabrielle Chapdelaine, translated by Josephine George.
It was produced by The Cherry Artists’ Collective.
LIVE ACTORS
Karl Gregory, Jahmar Ortiz, Erica Steinhagen, Sylvie Yntema
VOICE & VIDEO ACTORS
Susannah Berryman, Helen T. Clark, Austin Jones, Rafael Lopez, Elizabeth Mozer, Kathleen Mulligan, Darcy Rose, Joshua Sedelmeyer, Seth Soulstein, David Studwell
Live performance directed by Wendy Dann
Mise en stream directed by Samuel Buggeln
Sound design and new music by Lesley Greene
Costume design by Sasha Oliveau and Olivia Kirschbaum
Choreography by Kaitlyn Jackson
It will be live-streamed from the Ithica State Theatre November 13-21