“Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight” – Written and directed by John Kolvenbach. Presented by Huntington Theatre Company, the Maso Studio, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, through March 23.
By Michele Markarian
“I’m getting an East Village vibe here,” I whisper to my friend as we wait for the curtain to go up. But there is no curtain, only a low wooden platform for a stage, with mismatched, elegant chandeliers strung from the ceiling. Our chairs are mismatched as well. The house lights are up, and a buzzy kind of energy vibrates among the audience – what is it that we are about to witness?
Man (Jim Ortlieb) enters the stage, embodying the energy that all of us are feeling. He is apologetic – “I understand. I know what it is to leave the house. I know what it took for you to get here”. Of course, we have to laugh – it is a miserable, rainy night in January, after all – and just like that, Man has our sympathy and trust. This is important because Man, in his beseeching, is longing for connection, the kind of connection he says an infant has with its mother, before the infant realizes their body is their own.
In less than an hour, Man pleads with us for understanding, to be present, to merge as one. He leads us through a series of exercises in the hopes of getting us there, and to that end, he succeeds. “I clap, you clap,” he says a number of times, and oddly enough, we get into sync. He gives us a note to hum, we hum it. He tells us to stand, and we do it. He gives scripts to a few individuals to read back to him, as if in a play, and they do – it’s very funny. Full disclosure: I truly hate audience participation, but I find myself going with the flow, at one with the group and Man’s commands. To an extent, he succeeds in his desire for oneness, but he doesn’t think so. “I set impossible standards,” he tells us. “And they’re not impossible because they’re high. They’re impossible because they’re invisible.” In his soul mining, he finds himself unable to connect in spite of his wonderful efforts and the ensuing results from the audience.
Ortlieb is an engaging performer, filled with a kind of pleading, nervous, intelligent understanding that makes one want to take care of him or at least tell him that everything will be okay. Man is looking for that, too. Ortlieb’s delivery is quick, canny, sometimes self-pitying, and moving. There’s a tonal shift in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the play that doesn’t really fit with the rest of it, but I won’t give anything away here.
The real success of “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight” is the sense of connection that the piece fosters and the feeling of oneness in the room, of being part of something larger than our individual selves. The house lights are kept up for most of it, which only serves to strengthen the feeling of community, where emotional responses will vary. Many people laughed. A woman in the front row cried. Me, I liked the feeling of being kept off balance, of not knowing what would come next, of being able to say yes to whatever it was that Man was asking. It felt freeing. For tickets and information, go to: https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/stand-up-if-youre-here-tonight/
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