What is a person? It’s a question we’re asked directly at least twice in Chimera, a one-woman show created by Suli Holum (performer) and Deborah Stein (writer) that is being performed at HERE as part of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Are we defined by the swirling double helix's that comprise our DNA? Their outward manifestations as delimited by our bodies? Or are there worlds inside all of us that resist a strict accounting by scientific or corporeal fact?
We’re swept into the performance by a woman (Holum) who never introduces herself (for good reason, we find out later), offering us coffee with a folksy Midwestern accent and the sunny abruptness of a Hallmark Channel TV hostess. After assuming a perch in the audience from which she describes in detail a kitchen only hinted at by Jeremy Wilhelm’s spare white set, she launches into the story of the kitchen’s proprietress, Catherine Samuels.
As bits of information about Samuels are gradually revealed, we find out she is a microbiologist with an 8-year-old son, Brian. His tendency to scuff the walls with his sneakers is not the only manifestation of his human imperfections that his mother has trouble tolerating. When she finds out that Brian has a heart murmur, she is driven to root out the source of the offending gene. Her search leads her to plumb the depths of her own biology; what she discovers there tests the limits of her identity and her human capacity for love.
No one is credited as director, so we’ll presume that together, Stein and Holum have created some nice surprises in the way of staging. At one point, Samuels plunges headfirst into her kitchen sink, only to pop up in an unexpected place, and embodying a new person. Costume designer Tara Webb’s white and green color palette feels both perky and crisply scientific, and the flourishes with which new elements are produced—a frilly green apron, rubber gloves, a corset—are a nice touch. Visually, the production’s video projections—a key element—fall short. Kate Freer and David Tennent may have done an excellent job conceiving them, but it’s hard to tell, because even when lighting designer James Clotfelter darkens the space, the videos don’t render well on the white set, which serves as a screen. The results are fuzzy at best, and the sections of the show that relied heavily on video tended to lose my attention, including a movement sequence that should have been a focal point in the story. The only projection that really arrested was a panoply of stars. It’s a shame, because one senses that the video was reaching for a kind of sublimity that would visually match the ideas raised by the play.
And the show does pull in a lot of big questions in its broad intellectual sweep. There is a long passage about the Chimera, the mythic monster of the title, and another about a little girl in India born with eight limbs who was believed by many to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, until she underwent surgery to render her “normal.” If she really was a goddess, did medical science, by changing her body, wrest from her the divine?
It’s all fascinating stuff, but it can feel a little like reading an article in The Smithsonian. It’s a feat of storytelling that Stein has boldly and seamlessly merged character-driven narrative with idea-driven narration; Holum transitions from first person to third and back again, and from character to character, and mostly it works. But despite Stein’s efforts to ground the ideas in a concrete narrative, and a fluid and engaging (if slightly overstated) performance by Holum, the characters come out on the losing side. I came away wanting to know more about Catherine Samuels, the woman I’ll call her alter-ego, her husband, and her child, and how they were all affected by the events here. I wanted to see them interact with each other in a drama for several characters instead of hinted at in a one-woman show. It felt a bit as if Stein and Holum shied away from fully exploring these people and the journey they embark on, letting them hide behind the play’s intellectual ideas, where it’s theatrically safer but ultimately less interesting, and certainly less dramatic. It’s a credit to Stein and Holum that they created this compelling story; for me, the telling fell short.
Chimera
Created by:Suli Holum and Deborah Stein
Featuring: Suli Holum
produced by the Under the Radar Festival
playing at HERE through Jan 28.
For more information: www.here.org
Olivia Jane Smith is a writer, editor, and lifelong theater lover (her parents borrowed her name from "Twelfth Night"). She has written about theater for the New York Daily News, Backstage, and the Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, Louisiana. Follow Olivia at ojanesmith.tumblr.com
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