Review: Polar Bears

By: Robin Goldberg, B.A. Theatre Studies: Playwriting, '15

Up until this weekend, I had never attended a theatrical production in Piano Row’s Multi Purpose Room. I had been to a few small functions and had wandered through a trunk sale from the Performing Arts department’s costume stock, but I had always been curious how someone could stage a show in that kind of space. This past Friday night, I was not only finally able to satisfy my curiosity, but I was also afforded the opportunity to view a truly great piece of theatre. Polar Bears, written by Mark Haddon and directed by Alexandra Lonati (B.A. Theatre Studies: Directing, ’14), focuses on Kay, a young woman suffering from Bipolar disorder. The piece also allowed the audience to spend time with Kay’s loved ones and see them suffering from watching her suffer. In short, Polar Bears was a meditation on how to love someone as your heart is breaking.​
 

What struck me most about the production was the effect the space had upon it. The Multi Purpose Room is rather small, which makes staging and the separation between the actors and the audience a bit challenging. However, I think that under these circumstances, the close proximity worked in the creative team’s favor. Despite some distraction of falling travel mugs and some noise out in the hallway (such as life and live theatre), the intimacy and immediacy between the actors and the audience gave the piece a strong sense of universality. The audience was not simply watching a play unfold; they were a part of it. We too were sitting in the kitchen, the hospital, the train station. We too were part of Kay’s worried and heartsick family. I personally love small, intimate theatre spaces for this very reason. Bigger spaces allows for a wall between the performers and the audience. In that sense, the story holds the viewer at arm’s length and doesn’t quite let us in. In the Multi Purpose Room, this is next to impossible. The audience is instantly on board with the characters. Everyone in that space is in that situation together for the next two hours.
 

The other aspect of the production that I really admired was the photograph motif. When I spoke with Alex earlier in the day, she talked a lot about highlighting the episodic nature of the piece by playing up the concept of snapshots and pieces of a life. I really enjoyed the collage of photographs of Kay and her family spread around the space. Most of the photographs were of Kay, which played up the idea that she was the center of everyone’s universe, whether they wanted her to be or not. What really struck me though, was the flash of light signaling the end of each scene. For the first portion of the play, I was a bit confused as to what that represented, but then it hit me that it was the flash of a camera. Every moment, every memory, became a snapshot that hung in our minds and pieced Kay’s story together.
 

I thought the whole cast did a truly wonderful job. Mary Rochford was a force as Kay. Her seamless transitions from happiness to pain, from collected to shattered, and from woman to child were mesmerizing. I especially enjoyed her presentation of the children’s book and how much of her pain we could feel in its telling. Nico Walsh delivered a heart-wrenching performance as John, Kay’s loving husband forced to watch her fall apart and beginning to lose his own sanity in the process. Johnny Quinones and Sarah Youngblood each did a fantastic job portraying the brother and mother struggling to survive the suicide of a father and husband and the mental disintegration of a sister and daughter. Pablo Calderon Staniago also truly delivered as the mysterious Jesus character who appeared to Kay and John when they needed him most. This was Pablo’s first acting role at Emerson and I hope to see him again in future works. In her role as the director, Alex was able to coax very real, raw performances out of her cast. I was truly taken with how difficult it was for me to remember that this was a play, not an actual family drama unfolding in front of us. I jumped several times during the performance, floored by the intensity and very real-seeming pain bursting from the cast.
 

I applaud the work of the entire company and production team and I am very grateful to have been able to attend Polar Bears. I am looking forward to seeing more work from everyone involved in the future.
 

Polar Bears ran from February 15-16th, 2013 in the Multi Purpose Room.