Touch and Go

          Last night, I had the chance to watch a performance of Touch and Go by Celery Soup (inspired by the touch and go of airplanes practice landing, and the way people and events momentarily touch our lives). Going in, I knew what to expect because I read through the script several weeks ago. Understandably, the performance was not cinematic brilliance since the cast consisted entirely of volunteers. Nevertheless it offered a superb example of good story telling because it got two things right.

First it demonstrated this generation’s connection to the past.

          The entire play is a continuum of recollection about the past of this town. Through words and visuals they impressed upon the audience their own connection to the past by remembering great events in the town’s past and characters who have strut and fret their brief hour upon the stage, but are heard no more. They told stories about the past, and reminded the audience that our present will soon become a new past. How we live, what we do, whom we remember will impact the future. True to good storytelling, they recognized that history has neither beginning nor end. Arbitrarily history chooses one moment or experience from which to look back or, perhaps to look ahead. This method of remembering forced the audience to think about the concept of change: the good, the bad, the inevitability of it all.

Secondly, Touch and Go reminded the audience that history is memory, a tenuous thing.

          

          Once a memory is forgotten, the story is dead. History dies. In a particularly arresting scene at the end of the play, a woman comes on stage and recalls her ancestor’s enslavement from Cameroon almost four hundred years ago. Then she recalls their children, great-grandchildren, great-great grand relations to her. She recalls how her enslaved ancestors told their children stories from the past because they were not allowed to learn to read or write it down. We remember them, she say, in respect. When their memory dies they are gone, and they will end with her. Without children to remember her past, who will listen to her past and remember them? Will we remember them? Will we remember her? Who will remember Sanford?

Another great strength of Touch and Go  was the transfer of true stories, albeit with a little creative re-working.

"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But you believed it, you found something true about yourself." ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

          Like most memoir stories or creatively rewritten histories, the playwrights were “less concerned with facts and details than in the “truth” of experience, whether of a moral, spiritual, or psychological nature.”[1] As I said in my initial post, I believe that, while names and dates have their place in recording factual events of the past, the most important aspect of history is the transference of memories from one generation to the future.  

“Some stories demand to be remembered. They help us make sense of our lives, connecting us to one another and to those who lived long ago. As [the] characters come to understand the truths that give their lives meaning, so, too, do we.”[2]