In Rachel Ingalls' story "Correspondent," a librarian has an affair with and then marries a famous TV war correspondent.  When he is away covering events, he takes good-luck charms gathered during his travels, items such as a small silver teddy bear and a blue enameled St. Christopher medal, in the hope that they or his ritual taking of them will "magically" ward off injury.  Given the global nature of the correspondent's concerns, the wife is reluctant to trouble her husband with her own daily anxieties, but when she witnesses him make a small gesture at a party that suggests he is having an affair with another journalist, she becomes jealous.  While he is packing to leave for another international conflict, she takes his good-luck charms out of their handkerchief and surreptitiously replaces them with the keys to the house.  When he is subsequently shot in the field, she "magically" senses what has happened.  Ultimately, they are reconciled, but Ingalls leaves open whether it is a lasting peace or a lull in the battle.

"Correspondent" will provide the structure for a performance that examines how we relate to other people, their pain, and our own pain.  Vitally, what is the difference between pain and an image, photograph, or video of pain?  What is the difference, if any, between local and remote pain?  What is the difference between pain and the performance of pain, especially in a mediatized world where images of pain are frequently something to sell?

The piece is fundamentally a solo to be performed by Jeremy Xido. The premise of the work is that Jeremy, along with the director, Ehren Fordyce, has invited an audience to tonight's theater space to read and pry open Ingalls' story. Jeremy and Ehren have spent months reading and re-reading the story, interviewing real journalists on-camera, as well as their spouses, librarians, etc., in order to come to terms with how pain operates in our lives. Over the course of the evening Jeremy slips back and forth between the borders of his own personality, himself as a narrator of Ingalls' story, and the characters of Joan and Max in "Correspondent." In one sense, "Other People's Pain" is a private piece trying to fight its way out of the isolation of being a solo.

In another, the work is deeply about the public world of today. To open up from the private to the public--to move back and forth between the intimate and remote, domestic and international, as does Ingalls' story--video and audio interviews of specialists, as well everyday experts, are shown throughout the piece in order to expand on motifs in "Correspondent." War correspondents, librarians, jealous house-wives, men having affairs, marriage counselors, specialists in trauma, sellers of good-luck charms, pain scientists.

 

 

In a delicate way, the audience is at times also invited to speak. For these moments we envisage something different from a town hall or group-therapy session. As the war correspondent needs magical thinking to sustain him in the field and as Joan magically imagines herself connected to her husband's pain, we need a certain magical belief in others--trust--to support our relationships. Close-up magic, its cons and sleights-of-hand, serve to gingerly invite audience members to talk about themselves and to create a delicate, but perhaps illusory trust. When does our trust in relationships, like our sympathy for others' pain, reveal our capacity to open up to others, and when is it a way for us to believe that we are good because we trust and sympathize? Why do we go to the theatre to see other people's pleasure and pain?

In telling the story of "Correspondent," Jeremy does not speak like a professional raconteur, but as someone caught up in recounting a memory or compulsion--like the obsessional way in which we repeat traumatic events to ourselves to find a personal place for them that makes sense. Is there a way of relating to other people's stories that honors them? When confronted with other people's pain, how do we listen, and is there something more to be done? When does carrying the burden of other people's pain make us turn against them? Can pains be compared, or are they all private? Can we feel another person's pain, or is sympathy a way to solace our own consciences? How do we deal with others when we know that it might entail dealing with pain? Finally, in the tension between Jeremy "being" himself and Jeremy "playing" the narrator, there is another question:  am I trying to understand pain or am I trying to perform understanding pain?

In contrast to the public, mediated world of the video interviews, the narrator occasionally uses a simple, childlike technique of storytelling: Daumenkino, meaning "thumb-cinema" in German, and referring to the pre-cinematic art of creating moving pictures with a flipbook. This is the personal, intimate side to depicting Ingalls' story.  What was it like to meet one's lover for the first time?  Flip, flip, flip. What happened in the moment one first recognized that one's lover was having an affair? As the narrator obsessively flickers through a depiction of the event, the images are relayed through a video camera onto a screen, so the audience can also try to witness in the momentary absences between images what actually occurred. How do we remember pain, and can we really see it? Sometimes the narrator flips the Daumenkino backwards, as though trying to go back in time and erase memory.