The Crying Room: Exhumed
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https://carriageworks.com.au/events/liveworks-festival-2024/
Date Reviewed: 23/10/2024
As we walk into a space with furniture covered with material, it feels like visiting an old mansion where memories are preserved from the passage of time under dust cloths. We become, inadvertently, part of the story. Exhuming the dead.
With the brilliant use of staging, technology and a mesmerizing live score, performer Marcus McKenzie takes us on a journey where death is treated more like a joke, with humorous anecdotes of various ways to die and fun interaction with the audience, where McKenzie finds the commonality between us and him, the fact that we all will eventually die. As we laugh and come up with future scenarios, our naivety is interrupted by phone calls from McKenzie’s brother, who we find out has passed away a while ago.
These real-time phone calls make us question the linearity of time. What is the present, and what is in the past? Through this technique, we are suddenly face to face with laptop screens, where McKenzie retells the story of when he found out about his brother’s passing. Prolonging the inevitable, he was fighting a battle between wanting to keep normality and finding the right time to face the inevitable.
Through this clever use of technology and screens, it suddenly feels like the play is no longer in a theatre but a one-on-one conversation, almost like stumbling upon a video diary, where you become privy to a very personal story of loss and broken dreams.
By the end of the play, all that is left is a shrine to both McKenzie’s and possibly your personal trauma, the memories you thought you buried long ago but that have been exhumed. As you leave the theatre, the smiles and laughter that you shared only a moment ago are replaced by longing for the past, the illusive memory of your own life before you felt that sadness and hurt that you now share with McKenzie.
It is a captivating performance that will keep you thinking long after you leave the auditorium. On for four more nights only, don’t miss out on this incredible production.
This production is part of the Liveworks Festival 2024, hosted at The Carriageworks Performance Space from 23rd to 27th October.