A look into LubDub Theatre Company’s contemporary séance

“Do you believe in spirits?” a woman asks me.

We’re going around the room, each person describing themselves as “believers” or “skeptics” before we enter The Doubtful Guest. I’m naturally prone to skepticism as I suppose all critics must be, but when called upon, I answer “yes.”

Yes, I believe in spirits.

I’ll tell you why.

My friend Patty died when I was a junior in college. She had cancer: Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They diagnosed her in the summer between freshman and sophomore year.

I remember coming home from class one day to a strange message on our answering machine. My roommate wasn’t there at the time, so I listened to it alone. The voicemail sounded like a mistake; no one spoke. Instead, I heard a long silence, punctuated by:

…beep … beep …beep…

Then a pause, and once again, interrupted by:

…beep … beep …beep…

I shrugged. I thought it was odd, but erased the message, and went about my day, without mentioning it to anyone else.

It wasn’t until later, at dinner, when a group of us were seated around a wooden table under garish fluorescent lights in the dining hall that I thought again about the voicemail.

Another student asked if anybody at our table had gotten a weird message earlier that afternoon. She described what had been left on her answering machine. It sounded exactly like the strange voicemail I had received. Someone else, too, had received a similar recording on their answering machine. One of them, an aspiring doctor, thought the beeps sounded like a heart rate monitor. We realized we were all friends of the same person: Patty.

What we didn’t know it at the time was that Patty had already died. Her lungs had filled with fluid. Her organs were slowly failing. The hospital made her comfortable. She never regained consciousness. Those oddly similar messages had coincidentally been left for us during her last hours alive. And despite my best efforts, I’ve never been able to reason my way through what else could have caused it: messages filled only with repetitive beeps, all left on our separate answering machines that afternoon.

So, yes, I believe in spirits. But I’ve never tried to communicate with them, not on purpose. It never occurred to me to even try.

And that’s why it’s surprising that I find myself in the lower level of the PUBLIC Hotel in New York City, about to take part in my first séance.

As we soon learn, The Doubtful Guest is not a séance like you may have seen in the movies or on TV. This gathering is more like a satisfying evening at home with friends, including storytelling, dance, and even a few magic tricks here and there.

It’s honest, intimate, and interactive. And like any good party, you need snacks and music and conversation. A plate of cheese and fruit appears. Nametags are distributed. Silly straws and party hats are offered. We pass around a bag of chips. Someone shows off a card trick. Everyone is smiling, laughing. It’s not what we thought we were getting into.

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It’s someone’s birthday! We sing “happy birthday” to an unsuspecting victim (luckily her nametag tell us her name is Amy). Amy blows out a single candle and quietly goes to work cutting the cake into bite-sized pieces to share. When the makeshift platter comes my way, I remove a single cube of cake and pass it onwards, gesturing to my neighbor to take some cake. We have no utensils, only our hands. I am charmed.

The chairs get scrambled: the performers send us on an emotional speed-dating mission. Swapping seats every three minutes, we ask complete strangers personal questions: What word do you use for your grandmother and grandfather? Were you the first person in your family to be born in this country? What is the best piece of advice that comes from your family? Have you ever felt closest to someone who is no longer living? The strangers we are partnered with ask us these same questions back. We are asked to stare into our partners’ eyes, a la Marina Abramović. Remain silent. Just look.

We do this because we are a group of people who have never been assembled before, and we will never again all be in the same place at the same time. But tonight we are a community. And the connection between us as a group feels so authentic that when the couple next me leaves early, they apologize and do a half-wave as if to say, “see you later.”

And then we listen to stories from the performers about their own clans. I’m struck by these tales about their patriarchs and their matriarchs, their grandmothers and grandfathers. They share wisdom from kitchen tables and living rooms and armchairs.

If these stories sound real, it’s because they are.

I know this because I’m in the same corner of the room as the mother of one of the performers tonight. Mom? She’s an enthusiastic woman who isn’t afraid to speak up when the time calls for audience participation. She has black thick-rimmed glasses and a big smile; she is overjoyed to see her daughter in the performance tonight. You can hear her laugh from the other side of the room.

And her daughter, at one point, takes command of the performance and tells us all how her grandfather used to love listening to bolero. Her fondest memories are of watching him dance while spending summers visiting him in the Dominican Republic. She punctuates her anecdote by stepping into the center of our circle. She starts to dance, just as her grandfather did. She sways with her eyes closed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her mother, clutching her hand over her mouth and silently crying. She is watching her daughter. We are all watching her mother watching her dance. The mother closes her eyes, overcome for a moment, while the music plays on. I can’t count a single dry eye in the room. (Later on, I ask her if she knew if this was going to happen. She shakes her head no.)

The Doubtful Guest has just pulled off its greatest trick — it’s not the sleight of hand illusions, though those are quite clever. It’s not the sharing of family histories, confessing intimate details with strangers and forming our temporary tribe of theatre-goers. But the real trick is the feeling The Doubtful Guest creates with tonight’s audience: a sense of belonging together, in one place, at a single moment in time, and participating in something special.

We hold hands. I close my eyes. I think about my own family and the spirits we carry around with us every day, of those we’ve lost.

I remember how Brad would wear denim on denim when it was cool, and still wore it when it became uncool, and somehow missed it becoming cool again several years later. He was already gone.

I think about how Leslie would always put up an advent calendar in December, but a calendar filled with her writing, and even if you weren’t really big into Christmas, there would be a series of tiny gifts waiting for you on the Internet each morning. When she died, we scrambled to pick up the pieces.

And there was that time Chris came over once and moved our couch in the middle of summer while wearing a dress shirt and long pants because he came straight from the office, and then refused to take any money for his trouble. That’s the kind of person he was.

The spirits of friends, much loved, now gone.

So if a good séance is like hosting a good party, well, what about a good memory?

Because whenever you think of someone you loved, someone who is now gone, maybe, just maybe, whenever you call up that memory from deep within the recesses of your mind, what happens? What is a memory but a conjuring? Because when you conjure up a memory, you are creating it in your mind: the ghost of someone you loved but lost. The briefest of connections to the other side. A tiny spark of light you gently cup between your palms for a brief second, before it fades away.

And that itself, I think, is another kind of magic.

Sign up for LubDub Theatre Company’s mailing list to find out about future performances of The Doubtful Guest. In the meantime, you can listen to our podcast episode with the show’s creators.

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