Life and love seen through the lens of quantum theory is my favorite concern in all forms of contemporary art. Aside from fundamentally changing the way we understand the universe, Einstein's noodling about relativity made art’s age-old exploration of the split between perception and reality much more interesting. We could finally stop talking about gods and ghosts and start talking about how fucking weird it is that two people can see one thing in two completely different ways and still maintain an equally valid claim on reality.
Trying to reconcile the difference between the linear stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life and the nonlinear mechanics that actually govern life leads to so much confusion, disorientation, and heartbreak. This is the story, as it were, of Andrew Schneider's YOUARENOWHERE, which gave me the most dislocating, hallucinatory experience I’ve had in a theater in a while. Schneider's show uses next-level sound and lighting design (thanks Bobby McElver and Sonia Baidya, respectively), intelligent writing, and—believe it or not—masterful clowning to collapse the gap between the way we see the universe and the way the universe operates in an effort to present life in all of its scrambled splendor and sadness. It’s easily the most fascinating performance I've seen on a stage all year.
Instead of weaving a traditional narrative, Schneider smashes together heady quantum concepts with deeply personal stories to create a string of powerful, emotional associations. Topics under discussion include the idea that the more you know about the location of an object the less you know about where it’s going, growing out of your twenties, different but equally valid observations of the same event, romantic relationships and other drugs, nonlinear time, and the act of experiencing art. You’ll find similar concerns in Alejandro Cerrudo's Little Mortal Jump, Nick Payne’s Constellations, Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Tyehimba Jess’s Olio—all of which have come through Seattle in the last couple years. This attention to the relationship between time-space and love directed each of these artists to make groundbreaking work, and I'd love to see much, much more of it across the board.
To write about any of YOUARENOWHERE's innovations is to spoil them, but to give you an idea of how Schneider embodies some of these concepts in his performance, I’ll offer this scene.
The stage is bare except for a single picture frame dangling in the middle of the space. Schneider stands onstage in black jeans and no shirt with white powder rubbed on his face to emphasize the black/white color scheme.
He begins a vignette by breathlessly summarizing a famous problem Einstein posed about the issue of simultaneity, the idea that two people can have two different experiences of one phenomenon and still maintain an equal claim to a shared reality. This thought experiment proves, for Schneider, that "we exist in each other's realities, but maybe not in the way we say we do." He then tells the story of a personal relationship that did not go so well, but he whispers the conclusion of the story in the ear of one of the audience members in the front row.
In that moment, that one particular audience member is experiencing the intimate conclusion of a love story, and the larger audience is also experiencing the intimate conclusion of a love story, but—as with Einstein's thought experiment—both parties are experiencing that conclusion differently. Instead of being a cloying or overdetermined moment of a performer breaking through the 4th wall, the whisper-move poignantly concretizes the idea of simultaneity. That same sort of thing happens about 82 times throughout the show.
Shortly after the whisper, Schneider breaks the 6th or 7th wall—he skips a couple after breaking the 4th—and the world of the play opens up in a completely unexpected way that embodies another principle of quantum theory he had discussed earlier. It will flip your goddamned wig. Unfortunately, the Seattle show closed this weekend. Fortunately, Schneider is performing the sequel to YOUARENOWHERE this weekend. It’s called AFTER. Suzette Smith down at the Portland Mercury wrote up a nice little piece on it for last week’s paper. If it’s half as good as the show I saw last weekend, it’ll be well worth your time and attention.
