For the past few years, Meredith Treinen has been a behind the scenes player and occasional performer with companies like Ceaseless Fun and Play Collaborative Arts. She’s put her producing skills to work on everything from a one-act series to fully realized immersive productions.
Now, with Grief, Treinen steps fully into the role of creator-director with a personal tale of loss as seen through the eyes of three sisters.
We first encounter the trio at the kitchen table, a still air of sorrow hanging over them, before the desire to shake off the funk over takes them, and spins into a frantic, in some cases dervish-like, dance.
Over the course of the hour of the play, the action pans between dance, dialogue, and monologue — the heightened poetic language delivered with conviction by the game cast. The trio of Natalie Llerena, Juliet Deem, and Rachel Rivera are mesmerizing.
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We find the sisters newly in the wake of the loss of their brother, seemingly the one person who held their relationships together. As the story unfolds, the seams between the trio are illustrated as the threads of their collective life are teased apart.
Structurally, the play — and the space in which it takes place, an open plan live/work loft — offer up some challenges. Some scenes take place simultaneously, with dialogue overlapping from space to space. When the gamble works, it pays off beautifully, with the poetic text in each space playing off the other.
The performance that we saw was an invited dress, the first real test audience the show had, so there were still some issues with transitions and volume levels. As the show went on, however, the trio found their groove. A dance duet between Rivera and Deem was nothing short of electric, while a confrontation on the stairs between Llerena and Rivera smoldered.
It took a bit for the audience to find its permission to move through the space as well, something that the show may well have addressed by opening night. This is a show that benefits from having the audience hang back, while still taking the agency to follow the action that piques their interest the most. Which is perhaps the most delicate line to walk in the immersive spectrum, while also being one of the most rewarding. While there is an “I did it!” moment in this form, the role of silent omniscient witness brings its own brand of satisfaction.
Those familiar with the immersive dance theatre tradition will see some DNA shared with the Wilderness’ The Day Shall Declare It. It probably doesn’t hurt that Deem is a Wilderness company member, or a coincidence that Wilderness’ Annie Saunders was one of the invited guests on Preview night. The fearlessness with which this production uses the space — no surface being left untouched — and how the audience is brought in at points to help illustrate the story without becoming protagonists in their own right remind me most of that company’s signature show.
Grief is a solid debut for Treinen, who takes emotionally difficult material, and gives it a physically lyrical form. Immersive dance theatre is something I can’t really get enough of, so I hope to see more work in this vein from Treinen and her collaborators.
Grief plays through October 14th in an undisclosed location near Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets are $20.
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