I. Boxed In

Even before Karen Estrada took the stage for a mesmerizing solo performance, I was struck by the set.

It was opening night in Sturgeon Bay for Jennifer Blackmer’s I Carry Your Heart With Me, directed by Third Avenue PlayWorks Artistic Director Jacob Janssen as TAP’s contribution to the World Premiere Wisconsin festival. Having read the script, interviewed the playwright, and written a preview for this blog, I already knew the story – or thought I did:

A young stenographer with top-security clearance, working on an air force base during the height of the Vietnam War, learns that history isn’t quite as black and white as her transcripts might imply and as her superiors would have her believe.

There’s plenty of black and white in Alex Polzin’s scenic design, which recreates the sort of nondescript debriefing room in which 22-year old Esther once lived the story she now shares with us, as a middle-aged woman looking back on who she once was while reflecting on who she’s since become.

But despite the black-and-white tiling, the dominant color in Polzin’s design involves shades of gray – covering the walls, carpeting the floor, and suggesting the ambiguity that lurks in every story, no matter how confident and sure it may initially seem.

Driving that point home, Polzin’s gray box of a room is turned on its side, off-kilter. And there are numerous gaps in those black-and-white ceiling tiles, suggesting that any attempt to make air-tight stories within these walls will fail. Every story has holes; every ostensibly simple truth is more complicated than it seems. If Vietnam taught us nothing else, it surely taught us that.

And so it goes for Estrada’s Esther, who often resembles a caged animal, in a room that could be mistaken for an isolating prison cell from which she struggles to break free, connecting with others and thereby finding herself.

Those efforts to connect are reflected in how Esther transcribes, as she records the sounds between the words – “the cries and moans and tears and gasps and sighs” of the frequently dazed, confused, and broken men for whom words are never enough to fully convey what they experienced, 9000 miles away.

Yes: Esther’s superiors routinely excise such context from the official transcripts that pass for history.

And yes: In stark interludes during which her story is interrupted by portions of her own deposition, Estrada’s Esther grows tense and terse, conveying the terror of a young woman suspected of subversion and wondering if she’ll ever get to tell her own story – wondering, too, if she’ll ever escape the constricting box in which she’s confined.

But as Polzin’s set has already anticipated, Esther’s story finds its way to us; it’s urgent and achingly human in ways Estrada has made her own, throughout her career. Emphasizing what we’re witnessing, designer Colin Gawronski’s light pours through those ceiling holes while the walls themselves seem to pulse, as its shadows coalesce into barely discernible images.

Only look, Estrada implores, and you will see. And we do, as the thin and permeable membrane that passes for reality cracks, disclosing a more textured and much more colorful world of purples and reds and yellows suggesting anger, but also light. Killing fields, but also a passionately beating heart. Purple-cloaked-lies, but also the truth that sets us free.

And that frees Esther herself, to tell an inspiring story of human liberation. About a woman living in a man’s world who balks at playing her preassigned role. About a world in which summoning the courage to tell stories like this one is itself the story.

And about theater, which takes a playwright’s script and alchemically transforms it, challenging an audience to read better and see farther. Do so and we might actually learn how to honor Esther’s plea, that we learn to connect the poetry and the prose so that we don’t live our lives boxed in and alone.

II. Breaking Out

Two days later, on Mother’s Day, I traveled to Madison to watch the closing performance of Danielle Dresden’s A Woman Is . . ., through which actor Kiki Moritsugu chronicles her own liberating journey. Directed by Francisco Torres (with music direction and accompaniment from Lizzie Haller), Dresden’s play is TNW Ensemble Theater’s WPW festival entry.

The sparsely dressed black-box space in Edgewood College’s Diane Ballweg Theatre conjures an imprisonment all its own, involving a woman who, as Moritsugu candidly tells us, worried that unless “I was doing a show or had a lover, I felt incomplete.” “There wasn’t,” Moritsugu continues, “any there there” – just a black hole where a person should be.

True to its title, then, Moritsugu’s journey of discovery plays out as a quest to find herself; as I outlined in a preview for this blog, that discovery revolves around Moritsugu’s efforts to separate herself – as both a performer and as a woman – from her thespian mother.

Easier said than done, for a woman who tells us early on that she not only looks like her mother, but has the same hands and gestures. How might she distinguish her performing self from the larger-than-life parent who did so much to shape how she moves on the world’s stage?

Moritsugu foregrounds that dilemma from the top of the show with her rendition of Sondheim’s “The Glamorous Life” from A Little Night Music.

It’s no accident that as Moritsugu begins to sing, she is at first invisible – much like Sondheim’s bravely smiling daughter, plaintively singing of a stage mother whose gaze is turned toward the alluring footlights far more often than it’s turned toward her lonely child.

As is true through so much of this poignant show, Moritsugu’s bright smile never reaches her dark eyes, exuding the sadness of one who can’t quite hide how forlorn her younger self often felt.

As with so many songs in A Little Night Music – and as in so many of the songs that Moritsugu sings in this show – the girl Moritsugu embodies in this opening number is trapped in a role which doesn’t allow her to be her true self.

But those tell-tale eyes give her away. Ditto the feathery vibrato, through which Moritsugu strays from the line she ostensibly sings, betraying the feelings she can’t fully convey. And ditto the dancing, through which Moritsugu takes steps her non-dancing mother did not, crafting a style all her own (choreography by Lyn Pilch).

Moritsugu’s younger self may be caught in the mirror, reflecting back her mother. Or within those bright footlights and the audience beyond them. Or by the male gaze, very much including fantasies involving Eastern woman, which Moritsugu briefly and painfully embodies.

And always – always – by the mother who, Moritsugu tells us, “couldn’t see me as separate from herself.”

But through all her early efforts to reflect what others want to see, Moritsugu is also clearly herself; she’s the one telling this story, after all. Growing stronger as her story moves forward, she stakes an increasingly confident claim to being her own person.

That upward trajectory is also reflected in the songs, which are increasingly less about her mother and more about her own liberation. While the distinctive vibrato remains, Moritsugu also now occasionally lets loose, with a belt that showcases all her voice can do and all she herself has become, as a woman who knows what it means to roar and isn’t afraid to do it.

Singing Lola’s trademark number from Damn Yankees reminds us that Lola will soon rebel from her prescribed role as a minion. A riff on Sayonara – one of the Orientalist fantasies in which Moritsugu once performed – ends with her shedding a kimono.

Most important, Moritsugu’s rousing rendition of “But Alive” from Applause celebrates the “thousand different people” and “million different feelings” inside her.

Those people include her mother, accepted now as an integral part of what makes Moritsugu who she is – even as the lost girl she once was becomes a woman who is so much more. And who looks back, with love but also with distance, knowing that it’s time to say goodbye. Sunday may have been Mother’s Day. But in this moving show, it was also independence day.

I Carry Your Heart With Me continues through May 28 at 235 N. 3rd Avenue in Sturgeon Bay. For more information visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/i-carry-your-heart-with-me-3/.

The TNW Ensemble Theater production of A Woman Is . . . has now concluded. You can catch a reprise this July at the Toronto Fringe Festival and stop along the way at the justly renowned Stratford Festival, where Moritsugu’s mother once performed. You can read the program for the just-concluded TNW production here: https://www.tnwensembletheater.org/a-woman-is-program.html.