What does liberty mean to you?
Lately, it’s become a reflex to draw parallels between the shows I’ve seen and the events leading up to our new president’s inauguration, even if the plays have not explicitly been about that. After seeing Liberty Falls, 54321, that reflex wasn’t activated. Because the Moving Company’s show was about the election, and it made statements about it in nuanced, clever and hilarious ways.
The Moving Company was founded in 2008 during our last shift in administrations. It could hardly have chosen a better time to stage the show: the weeks leading up to and then following Donald Trump’s start day. Better still, I went on the eve of the inauguration, a few hours after theaters across the country lit lights promising to uphold tolerance and inclusion for all, and two days before marchers around the world flooded city streets in defense of women’s and human rights. On that slushy Thursday night, only a small bunch of people made it out to the Lab Theater, but the group was a hearty one. We were perhaps in search of something funny, off-kilter, sometimes nonsensical, but usually all too poignant. In other words, we were looking for what the company is known for, and it was in great form that night.
Turning the Lab into a bare-bones “cafenasium” of fictional Liberty Falls, Wisconsin, the show opens with three Midwestern women of varying archetypes. There’s the upbeat volunteer who doesn’t “wanna step on anyone’s toes,” the cougar in curlers, and the socially inept entertainment coordinator, Carmel (pronounced, she reminds us every time, Car-MEL) — played respectively by Nathan Keepers, Jennifer Baldwin Peden, and Christina Baldwin. They’re setting up for a momentous event in their town: a party for Liberty Rose Johnson (Steven Epp)’s 107th birthday. The elder is not exactly “with it” and half the words out of her mouth are insulting or downright derogatory, but Liberty Rose’s family history is closely tied to the town, and they’re there to celebrate her.
When her granddaughter’s fiancé (Dom Wooten) makes a surprise appearance, Liberty Rose collapses and/or dies, largely in reaction to the color of his skin. Then the team improvises. The show melts into an operatic pageant that celebrates both Liberty’s life and death. She’s at once the person who brought everyone together and a source of bigoted ideas that would be better off buried with her.
Between dream and awake
The paradox here is that we celebrate historically significant people whose ideas threaten the way we live today. The show demonstrates (quite literally) the dying off of racist and nationalist ideas, and then the catch of, “oh, wait, did those actually die off?” The actors nailed the strange silences, the near-brushes of lips, the pushes and prods and political remarks disguised as old lady mumbles. And it all happens in a world somewhere between reality and dream, spiraling into more and more dreamlike territory at the end, with the climatic opera.
The company originally produced the show in late 2015, also at the Lab, and I wonder what it added or changed since then. Quite fittingly, this version’s Liberty Falls has also just had an election. On overturning a box from the alley, Keepers’s character discovers a pile of old ballots. “This one’s Hillary … this one’s Hillary,” the character reads. In the midst of this bizarre dream, we learn that Liberty Falls exists not in an alternate universe, but in our own. It reminds us we’re not going to wake up from this political period anytime soon.
Also, who or what is liberty, anyway? Is it the ability of an archaic woman to say whatever hateful things pop into her head? Is it a town’s choice to celebrate whomever they want, or country to pick a leader no matter what that leader represents? Is it for a black man to feel accepted in his community, be it rural, fictional, real or metropolitan?
One thing’s for sure: it was darn satisfying to laugh at the absurdity that all these questions create when mixed together. But rather than suggest there’s nothing to do but laugh, the show stayed hopeful. In the aftermath of Liberty Rose’s fall, the characters seemed to be celebrating the potential of a new era.
All in the context
Had it been another night, had I been feeling less adventurous or in a more traditional-storytelling mood, Liberty Falls, 54321 might not have struck all the right chords. But in context with the times and the atmosphere, it was a fulfilling performance. The time spent watching the three characters setting up the party (or showcasing their uselessness) felt longer than necessary, but the actors played filled the time expertly. The company’s signature physicality under Dominique Serrand’s direction kept the show flowing and built naturally to the operatic finale. The arc of small-town weirdness would have worked on its own, but hearing the Baldwin sisters sing with Wooten’s gorgeous tenor made it all the more worthwhile in the end. Heidi Bakke stood out as Liberty Rose’s granddaughter, who debates whether to put her marriage on hold until the woman dies. (Can we put our lives on hold until this all blows over?) Epp is fantastic as the living Liberty but perhaps even more wonderful as the stiff and dead one.
Reviving the old days
I’m not from a generation that got to see these artists in their Theatre de la Jeune Lune days, and when I did see Out of the Pan Into the Fire in 2013 I just did not connect. I went to this show wishing I was either wiser or unexposed; that this was either the first of their shows I had seen or the 21st. Luckily, it didn’t matter. Should it ever? The small but hearty audience I mentioned was mostly old, but also a little young. The show had us all.
Because the point of this thing was to laugh, even if we sometimes felt uncomfortable about it; just as we might laugh this very week as we watch the news and witness events that would be so funny if they were in a dream, but they’re not, so they’re terrifying. Liberty Falls captures the horror and the beauty of living in limbo, be it in a small town about to part with its oldest member or a nation on the edge of a new and not-yet-known age. Like all the plays I’ve seen lately, with or without making connections to our political climate, it demonstrated theater’s ability to help us in the face of it all.
It will be interesting to see what The Moving Company creates during the new administration. It’s off to a good start.
