OVERUNDER ARTS: This bedside table seems way too real.
  • OVERUNDER ARTS: This bedside table seems way too real.

Sad fact: The theatergoing public skews in a very specific way, age-wise, and it is not towards the under-30 crowd. This matters—when audiences aren't diverse in terms of age, there's little incentive to produce stories that actually include young people. So in deciding what shows to see at this year's Fertile Ground festival (and I really am just seeing plays all week, like the former theater geek that I am), I intentionally sought out shows with young producers, writers, directors, and casts. I saw two of them this weekend: overunder arts' down and the Third Rail Mentorship Company's ID[ea].

overunder arts' mission statement includes a commitment "to making accessible and available theater that deals openly and honestly with millennial life—the joys, hardships, fears, questions, quirks, imperatives, and everyday business of being young in America."

After seeing down, a play about Alex (Corinne Bachaud), a twentysomething woman going through a period of severe depression, I think I know what they mean. down utilized a very experimental, performance art-adjacent staging style to give the audience the sense of being a fly on a wall in Alex's apartment. This was achieved with Bachaud's live performance in one room, that was then projected in the seating area in the next room. As Alex listened to voicemails from her mom, saw specters of anxiety in her chrome-sided toaster, and tried to distract herself from her feelings with Friends and Ke$ha, you could see her do these things, but there was a physical barrier in between. If you've ever been close to someone battling depression, the clothing strewn on Alex's bedroom floor, the stained countertops, the unanswered text messages will all provide a potent shock of recognition. But the effect of the wall is two-fold: It casts Alex's isolation into sharp, powerful relief, as well as our own inability to access her world. We can't help. We can only watch.

The day before I saw down, I went to see the Third Rail Rep's Mentorship Company in ID[ea], a devised work about different entry points into identity. This is a challenging topic to explore onstage, and some of the company's choices were a little baffling. But when it worked, it really worked, in hilarious, weird bits as when they embodied the types of people you meet on Tinder (with taglines like "Don't murder me!") and another segment which took the format of a game show, requiring contestants to fill the emotional voids in their lives by eating massive amounts of bread and whipped cream.

Both down and ID[ea] completed their runs over the weekend, but overunder and members of the Third Rail Mentorship Company will be involved with other projects later in 2015. It'll be interesting to see what they do next.

EDIT: down's final Fertile Ground appearance took place over the weekend, but there are three remaining performances of ID[ea] scheduled for this weekend. More details and ticketing information here.