All Together Now: Camping Out at the NY Fringe Festival

When I started, I wanted to make a play about love. That's a big concept. I started out with a pretty academic approach -- I was going to read Freud's love letters to his fiancé on stage, make animations to project behind me, and talk about concepts of love. But it quickly got much more personal.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

2016-08-10-1470833844-631672-jump2.jpg
(Photo: Ilana Simons)

Even at the New York International Fringe Festival, an event known for its unique and experimental theater pieces, it's not common to find an entire audience lying on the floor. But in Ilana Simons' All Together Now, a one woman show debuting at this year's festival, the audience will not only be on their backs but also inside a tent, hand-stitched by the playwright herself. Simons is a psychologist, literature professor, and animator who wrote All Together Now after her divorce, as a way to name childhood longings, or to learn why she married a man just like her father. She stitched the cloth walls of the tent and animated the intricate videos that project onto them and Simons embeds herself alongside the audience, on the floor of her tent, to deliver a unique and beautiful reverie of love and loss.

Ilana spoke with me about the genesis of her show, the tent, her divorce, and the therapeutic effects of theater.

What was your inspiration for All Together Now?

When I started All Together Now, I wanted to make a play about love. That's a big concept. I started out with a pretty academic approach-- I was going to read Freud's love letters to his fiancé on stage, make animations to project behind me, and talk about concepts of love. But it quickly got much more personal. I was getting divorced and wanted to think more about how and why I'd fallen in love with the man I'd married. I also wanted to think about the relationships I have to men in my family. It became a very intimate work.

Do you think of it more as a play or a film?

When I've asked people to come over to help--to see the piece and brainstorm with me--I've usually used the word "movie." Somehow that seems to ask for less investment from their help ("come hang out and watch this movie"). "Play" feels like a more entitled claim coming out of my own mouth. Maybe because I haven't done one before.

But I really do think of it as a play, because that's been the major challenge of making the work. I've made video -- animations that live online -- for years. I've never made something to perform live like this, on stage. Figuring out how to bring my animated movies into a live experience was the heart of the project.

What was the motivation for having people lie down?

I kept trying to write a narrative in which I would be on stage. The "lecture" about Freud's letters was one version. But I was having trouble owning my authority. That's a theme of the work--how I do or don't inhabit a voice that I believe others want to hear. There was something about lying down that allowed me to speak with less promise and more intimacy. You don't feel like you're taxing your listener with your dramatic stage promise. That's ironic of course, because when you put your audience into a tent, on the floor, you're making it hard for them to leave. So the dominance is covert. But lying down has many connotations that I'm drawing on-- analysis, dreaming, sex, bedtime stories, stargazing.

2016-08-10-1470833550-1392066-tent61.jpg
(Photo: Patrick Harnett-Marshall)

And what is the significance of having the audience inside a handmade tent?

The hushed tones. The intimacy of being invited into someone's room. I've been thinking a bit about Virginia Woolf's phrase "a room of one's own," too-- that I could reject the grand stage that I didn't know how to occupy and just build an oddly-shaped room that holds my body at rest, in order to feel my voice echo in there. Feeling your self fill a room that's right for your own proportions.

Why did you decide to create this show about your divorce?

Art has always been the way I calm and focus my monkey mind. Running helps, too.
But I was fixated on the question of distortion during the divorce: how do we idealize the people we're with as we're falling in love. And then the veil falls years later. It's nearly hallucinogenic. That led me to thinking about how I idealized men in my family as a child. The movie is really about that--how I have idealized a certain type of man throughout my life, and how that idealization has affected my own self image.

2016-08-10-1470833609-7061354-painthim.jpg
(Photo: Ilana Simons)

It sounds like you started as a literature scholar and then became a psychotherapist. And you're also a filmmaker, animator, and now playwright. What were the steps that led up to these identities? How do you see these them as related--or do you see them as separate?

One idea I'm working on in the play is how I have sustained the "little sister" role that was so large for me as a child. I had a stunning awe for my big brother when I was growing up, and that role--of the initiate, the student--became my go-to posture. In my twenties, I tended to date men who were much older than I was. I think I was scared to take the lead with men. And, now I know this about me: whenever I get close to mastery in one field, I shuttle out of it to become a student, an initiate, in another. The benefit is that I have left a snail's trail of learning and interesting work behind me. The sadness is probably this deep discomfort with taking a confident leading role. I am more comfortable in the hard-work/got-to-catch up posture than in self-assurance.

That said, it's true that the fields I've pursued all relate to each other in a deep way. I have a big appetite for hearing about people's inner lives - and psychology, literature, and the kind of art I do are all about carving out some odd space, other than our grand public space, for sharing intimate ideas.

Do you feel that this combination of therapy, humanities, and artistic production can lead to a kind of healing experience beyond the usual settings of therapy?

Making my show has definitely been a great course of therapy for me. Filming for the show was sometimes combined with my actual therapy: when I was having trouble starting the piece, I brought my video camera into sessions with my own therapist, and asked her if I could tape us while I "played the role" of a more confident artist. Luckily, she was game. Having that space to embody an alternative persona was life-altering for me.I also did video interviews with my brother, father, and ex-husband for this piece--and each interview started an unlikely conversation in those relationships.Getting feedback on the piece was perhaps the best therapy--hearing how this narrative I tell about my life strikes other people. And of course there's the curative act of just turning a trauma into art--you come to master the narrative that once scared you.

I purposefully marked off four months after the piece goes up in order to travel and think. I believe that the piece helped me enter a new chapter in my life--and I am going to travel to figure out what to do next, to let the new feelings settle in.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot