Theatre in Review: The Voices in Your Head (Egg and Spoon Theatre Collective/St. Lydia's)

	Daphne Overbeck. Photo: HanJie Chow.

You know all about immersive theatre; the people behind The Voices in Your Head are taking a step further, aiming for a kind of theatre of communion. It's not for nothing that Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee's play unfolds at a church named St. Lidwina's, a thinly disguised version of St. Lydia's, a nondenominational congregation in Brooklyn that redefines the Eucharist as a full meal shared by all in attendance. The play is being presented at St. Lydia's, where McEntee is part of the leadership.

This matters because The Voices in Your Head unfolds at a grief support group meeting; the purposely tiny audience, meeting in a multipurpose room, is seated in a circle. Tea and cookies are served, and soothing music is played before the play begins. Guided by a facilitator named Gwen, we make ourselves comfortable, not perhaps fully aware that among us are professional actors, until they speak up.

Well, why not? The church connection is historically plausible since drama was born from religious observance. More recently, the intimate blending of actors and audiences harkens back to the 1960s and the work of groups like The Living Theatre and The Open Theater. Furthermore, you can argue that the therapeutic sharing in which the characters take part is the signal religious practice of our time. Certainly, The Voices in Your Head comes by its provenance honestly.

There is, however, the question of execution. St. Lidwina, you should know, is, among other things, the patron saint of chronic pain and ice skating. This is for real but the authors' attachment to this bizarre detail tells you plenty about the peculiar combination of melancholy and whimsy that makes up The Voices in Your Head. Central to the show's conception is that Gwen's group is focused on people mourning deaths that are too embarrassing to discuss under normal circumstances. There's Regina (Daphne Overbeck, a natural storyteller), whose husband overindulged on a cheese buffet and expired in full public view at a family birthday party. Sandra (Erin Treadway, effectively bitter) can't let go of the daughter who died from an ill-advised science project, trying to achieve liftoff with a chair and some balloons. And let's not forget Blake (Alex Gibson affable and a solid raconteur), a gay guy in his 30s whose older lover dropped over while performing his duties as a department store Santa. "There's a Netflix special in here somewhere," he asserts, looking to monetize his loss.

Other stories are on tap, in addition to role-playing games and musings about life, love, death, and the importance of joy. On the latter point, Gwen (Jamila Sabares-Klemm) brings up the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who "says people, our bodies, on a Darwinian level, use laughter to form bonds. It's a key part of establishing norms. So, in ancient tribes, members laughed at similar social cues to share a language, and isolate intruders. This brought groups closer. Our bodies need laughter, for evolution, which means, okay, we need laughter to repopulate."

The idea, I suppose, is that embracing one's sorrows, no matter how ridiculous they may appear to others, is the way to heal. Fair enough, but the stories told in The Voice in Your Head aren't especially funny and they fall far short of the truly grotesque. Employed well, embarrassment can provide a motherlode of laughs, but the show's humor falls somewhere between sketch-comedy punchlines and the granular detail that would make the characters seem like real people. Gwen exerts iron control over her group -- indeed, she expels one interloper because the story isn't humiliating enough -- urging them to embrace their strange fates, even celebrate them. But one never feels that her participants are particularly mortified by their tragedies; some of them don't even come across as particularly sad. An awkward, half-hearted atmosphere dominates, and it isn't alleviated when the entire cast gets up and dances to the Laura Branigan classic "Gloria."

There's another minor, but persistent, issue that becomes increasingly apparent. Seated so close to the actors -- in some cases, right next to them -- one can't ignore how much they are acting. This is nothing against the solid team of professionals hired for the occasion but, under Ryan Dobrin's direction, they struggle to get a purchase on the material, and, seen so close-up, their choices are only too visible. Even their relatively restrained use of artifice militates against the you-are-there feeling the production strives so hard to create.

It's hard to know what audiences are meant to take away from The Voices in Your Head. The authors don't have the taste for comic blood that would let them play their characters' calamities for laughs mixed with heartbreak. Indeed, the entire production is founded on an idea that they have trouble expressing in dramatic terms. (With its one-hour running time, it often feels like a treatment for a proposed longer work.) You can't offer comfort unless you disturb your audience first, which is something they never manage to do. Gwen, says the group "helps us exchange some weird-ass joy." But The Voices in Your Head is much too mild for such things. Anyway, as far as it goes, it's an interesting experiment. And I highly recommend the cookies. --David Barbour