In Praise of Intimacy
Peter Friedman, Deirdre O’Connell, Reed Birney, Tracee Chimo, and Heidi Schreck in Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons in 2009. Photo: Joan Marcus.
Around the time I was taking my first steps as a theater-maker, I won a ticket lottery for the first preview of a new play. I showed up at the theater and a sign was posted in the lobby: “This play will run two hours and 15 minutes with no intermission.” My heart sank and my bladder clenched. This theater had notoriously uncomfortable seats.
But two hours and 13 minutes passed in a blink. Then, in the final moments, the actress Tracee Chimo, with deft dialogue and a languorous lighting cue, grew from a teenager into an adult before my eyes. She spoke slowly. Stood perfectly still. And yet, she was barreling through time, years passing every second, each line an accumulation of a life—rushed, fragile, tenacious, maddeningly slow. The realization of what was happening in front of me, the theater of it, was like gravity sucking me into a black hole through which the universe would never look the same.
The play was Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker. And the feeling I had watching that final moment 16 years ago—what was it, exactly? This sense of private metamorphosis in a public space? How could I be surrounded by others yet feel the play was speaking only to me?
Much has been said about the communal experience of theatergoing: strangers in a room, heartbeats in sync. A veritable Zumba class, in plush velvet seats. But my night at Circle Mirror Transformation was not that. It was intimate, in the deepest sense of the word—close, private, a secret exchange between me and the play. The rest of the audience had disappeared.
I’ve been chasing that feeling lately, in my writing, in my theatergoing. Not the intimacy of small rooms or quiet moments, necessarily, but an almost romantic intimacy—the shock of feeling seen, of a relationship that defies outside interpretation, of something like love.
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving,” wrote bell hooks. I am yearning to love more than ever, in our chaotic, unrecognizable moment. I need to fall back in love with the world. I recall that night at Circle Mirror Transformation. Can a theater of intimacy teach me to love again?
On a recent night in July, my partner and I compare notes after seeing Viola’s Room, the new show by Punchdrunk, creators of Sleep No More. We’d just spent an hour feeling our way, barefoot, through a series of elaborately conceived rooms at the Shed, led only by savvy lighting design and the dulcet tones of Helena Bonham Carter, piped into our ears via headphones. It’s like we lucid dreamed our way through a carpeted Miyazaki sketchbook.
Audience members move through the immersive experience of Viola’s Room, presented by the Shed and Punchdrunk. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
There’s only one path through Viola’s Room, but the gulf between our interpretations of what we’ve seen is oceanic. To my partner, the experience was an allegory for queer teenagers leaving home to find their tribe. But I’d conjured a dead girl, with us as her grieving parents, searching for alternate realities to avoid the concrete hardness of loss. Our debate is electrifying. Usually, post-show we’re trying to get on the same page. Here, it’s impossible. Are the scrawled journal entries papering the walls a point in my partner’s column? Maybe the life-sized toy soldier face-down in the corner is a point in mine. Who knows!
Punchdrunk revels in narrative ambiguity. But central to their work is a carefully curated intimacy: you leave feeling the event was made precisely, and only, for you. They are uninterested in offering up a communal experience. They, deliciously, claw this convention to shreds. (Years ago, in my first minute at Sleep No More, I was forcibly separated from the person I came with. I didn’t see him again until hours later, on the street, after the show.)
That spiritual singularity I felt at Circle Mirror Transformation is, at Punchdrunk, physicalized. You share a room with fellow travelers, but wearing a mask, or a pair of headphones, silos you into an audience of one. Your experience is completely your own. The magic trick is that you understand this of everyone else, too. There is no purity test for viewing a Punchdrunk show. No corralling an audience to see and think and believe the same thing. The space to which you are transported afterward fosters dialogue, curiosity, exchanges of prismatic points of view. This intimacy begets honesty. Vulnerability. It resists the idea that what is spoken loudest is most true. Intimacy says: tell me your story. Intimacy asks: what does the world look like to you?
Theatrical intimacy is often described in terms of scale—Uncle Vanya in a broom closet!—but it’s a result of craft as much as anything else. If intimacy is a distinct exchange between an individual and a work of art, it’s not about smallness; it’s about connection. And a theater of intimacy invents new ways to connect—ones that jolt us into feelings of deeply personal revelation.
See, for instance, the ingenious Broadway production of Maybe Happy Ending. Where Punchdrunk scatters a communal happening into a personal one, director Michael Arden inverts the literal architecture of public and private experience. Maybe Happy Ending crafts its intimacy through a masterful combination of specificity, focus, and sheer theatricality: on a set that hones us in on the actors’ subtle performances, the only elements writ large are the characters’ most guarded secrets, splayed out as massive video projections. It flips the script that says our external personas must be outsized, while our private ones stay silent and small. I left the theater with an expanded sense of myself, the peculiarities of my inner life worthy of filling a giant, glowing stage.
Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen in Maybe Happy Ending. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
Hannah Gadsby uses craft to weaponize intimacy in their solo show Nanette, which I—humble brag—saw in its early run at the 178-seat Soho Playhouse in 2018. With surgical precision, Gadsby demonstrates how easily a storyteller can manipulate an audience into a collective response. Through waves of laughter and silence, Gadsby is our conductor and we their unwitting symphony—even as they explain that our reaction is the product of a deliberate trick of rhythm and delivery. To be used so blatantly as Gadsby’s puppet is to feel caught, singled out. No longer are we a blobbish mass in the dark; we’re a collection of naïve, complicit individuals. We are made acutely and uncomfortably aware that by ceding our agency to Gadsby, we’ve lost something vital of ourselves.
Gadsby presses this idea as they reveal the reason for their manipulation: an exorcism of comedy itself, in which we, the audience, have been implicated. “I don’t want to unite you,” Gadsby says. “I just need my story heard … by individuals with minds of their own.” Intimacy, then, is a call to action, a private connection forged for the public good. It is necessary, urgent, the thing that might save us from ourselves. This explains my frustration when a musical ends with some anthemic lesson we’re meant to have learned: it’s not a writer’s job to inspire groupthink, no matter how thrillingly the message is belted. A writer’s job is to remind us that we’re a theater full of disparate souls, complex and coexisting in a delicately balanced world—and we’ve got to leave the theater and hash it out among ourselves.
In my musical All the World’s a Stage, which premiered Off-Broadway at Keen Company in the spring, a gay teacher in a small, largely Evangelical town finds his truest moments of connection sitting alone in the dark, watching plays. The opening number follows him on one such trip to a local theater, as a trio of characters narrates his way. “You watch in the darkness,” they sing, blossoming into harmony, “As the world falls away.”
Matt Rodin and Jon-Michael Reese in the Keen Company production of All The World's a Stage by Adam Gwon. Photo: Richard Termine.
In rehearsal, the cast asked me what play I imagined the teacher had gone to see. I hadn’t clocked it until that moment, but of course I was writing about Circle Mirror Transformation. Of course I was trying to give words to that night. Voice to that feeling. Sound to that intimacy, as the world around me shouts itself apart. Sharing it in hopes that we—alone and together—together and alone—might start to rebuild, might learn to love again.
Intimacy means feeling known as ourselves, somehow singular among eight billion others spinning on the planet. To heal our fractured collective might be to protect this multiplicity. And to connect requires a distance we must reach across. A theater of intimacy creates space around us. Then expands us so we fill it. Fill it so completely we start to touch neighboring souls.
Night after night, we watch in the darkness, as the world falls away. Let the world fall away, so we can find our way back to it as our fullest, most loving, most kaleidoscopic selves.