Hello Susan!
I got to see your show Thursday; I sat in the back with my best friend, you probably heard us laughing. I got absolutely drenched in rain seconds before getting to the venue! I’m meticulous about the weather every morning, and knew it would be raining around the show’s start, but for some reason, I went off to work without an umbrella, something I’m usually so careful to have with me. I was waiting for my friend on a bench a few blocks over when it started to rain, minutes before we were to go in-the kind of city rain that scatters everyone and cleans the streets. It now seems fateful that this happened.
You have made an absolutely delightful and moving piece of theater. It’s a polished, poignant narrative experience that handles a journey of grief in a way I haven’t seen before. It’s not exactly grief, though, is it, but resentments; these things that we hold onto and get so used to that they become us. Thank you for being so giving of yourself, sharing that permission to others through this show.
You make such expert work of repetition with entrances and exits, image, sound, lighting, and lines of dialogue like “the Camino provides”, which make for a viewing experience that is full of nuance and yet so direct. It was funny, heartwarming, and harrowing. I have no idea why more people weren’t losing it at the wobbly cart; your physicalizations are infectious, and you brought perfect levity to support the seriousness. Your approach to writing and acting is so focused and sure. It’s unapologetic, it’s pure theater. It was so patient and steady.
Your use of many characters to hold your many different perspectives was so compelling. The show asked a simple question: how free do you want to be? To see it answered over and over again through the imagery of fish hooks and tar buckets and weeks of cold rain, to hear it asked through love and grace and mortality itself was divine.
It reminded me of similar stories of traversing nature for guidance, like Strayed or Life of Pi (I’d watched the movie again just a few days ago, so no doubt that’s why the rain felt so perfectly timed). Your piece sparked a memory of the resentments and rages I am still holding onto more than I thought I was. While I may not be on the Camino, I’ll certainly take the lesson that now is the moment to see what can be given back, what can be slopped off, and what was never about me.
I hope to always be making art with the same vigor you showed. On that Thursday evening, soaked in rain, I found you to be a great inspiration of the necessity for art and the inevitability of it.
Hoping you continue to be surrounded in love.
With great gratitude,
Jake Lucas
Susan Edsall’s Buen Camino plays at the Yellow Bicycle Theater Sept 4th and 10th.
Jake Lucas’ PRIDE and Prejudice plays Sept 19th-28th at ComedySportz Philadelphia.
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