Between Us

Guests were whipped around the back entrance of the ATYP Studio Friday night.

A line of young adult performers stood along the back wall blank-faced, blocking off the traditional performance space. Once the chair-less, rustic back room was filled, another teen played a simple piano melody, before a TV screen crackled and snapped to life and the audience was left staring at the face of a young woman recalling a divisive tale of assisted suicide.

At the conclusion of every monologue, the actors would lead the audience to the next performance space in a different room with a different ingenious, elaborate set design. Unconventional set-ups are a risk. When the monologue was successful, like the story of a young, paranoid pianist drowning under the high standards of her grandmother, the stage set-up made the audience feel like they were being taken to windows that they weren’t invited to stand at, peering in on important and formative life moments. When they missed the mark, like the wordy, loosely symbolic tale of a kid’s obsession with ants as a metaphor for bullying, the audience started to notice how their feet hurt and that someone hadn’t applied deodorant. Luckily, the former outweighed the latter, and when the performers all stood up and bowed, they got the rousing applause they deserved.

ATYP Studio 1 to 21 Feb