Skin Tight

I am not actually Rapid Descent. I am Leah, friend of Rapid Descent, fellow theater-maker and guest blogger. These are my brief thoughts and observations on Skin Tight.

Living is a messy business – beautiful, lyrical, heart-breaking, bone-crushing. It is my experience that the suffering any of us endures in life comes when we function under the fallacious belief that we’re in control. That’s the moment when, as Julia Sweeney once coined it, “God said hah!” The truth is that life lives us, and the best we can do is to flow with it. This is grace, and the ways we resist and give in to this grace becomes the 2-step of our lives.

Skin Tight is wrought with this beauty. It is a magnificent, rowdy, quiet exploration of the enduring stillness around our lives, and the frantic activity inside of it. In each rehearsal and performance that I’ve seen of this show, I walk away both crushed and invigorated by the simple, human, immediacy of the experience.

I see a sensuous, tactile, physical experience, an actual embodiment of what it is to live. This is part of what makes Rapid Descent’s work stand out for me. The tangible, directed physicalization of Elizabeth and Tom, of how the actors literally move into, over and away from each other is, independent of the script, a story of living. The moments this physicalization takes over are the moments that most break my heart and enliven my sense of living as I watch.

There is a trumpeter – a participating witness – who plays off of Elizabeth and Tom, who comments, watches, listens with his music, rolling sound over the arcs and valleys of these specific hours at this specific time in these specific lives. He is the air around the couple, his notes are the stillness blowing a breeze through each of the seamlessly intertwined scenes they are living.

And then there is Elizabeth and Tom. Intimate. Connected. Vulnerable. Fiery. Living in a world that centers around their own lives. In command of lives they have no control over. The relationship between these two, the simplicity with which this production allows them to breathe, reminds me of the phrase on my parent’s tombstone. “Love endures.” And it does, so profoundly, between these two people. And again, it is the intense physicalization that marks Rapid Descent that most articulates this dynamic. And again, this physicalization becomes an articulation of what it is to live, independent of the story or the words. The sex scene at the end of the play – wordless, raw, graceful and unsentimentally sincere – allows Elizabeth and Tom to give over to and pass through the pain life is serving up by releasing to their bodies. In that physical exit Elizabeth finds grace and Tom… Tom lets life live him. And Rapid Descent, it watches as movement and sound, bodies and emotion blend to create a 2-step of 2 lives.

“Elizabeth, we’re not perfect. We’re mortal. We struggle and we do what we can. And it’s enough.”

“I have to go…. Tom, I remember everything.”

The days seep into days. Melancholy layers moments of humor. Bodies roll, connect, push and move. Music sweeps over it all. My heart breaks.

In the end we have only what we have.