Memento Vivere: Remember to Live a New Work From The Moving Company a Show I Will Never Forget, Funny, Thoughtful, Unique. Dead Brilliant!

Memento Vivere: Remember to Live finishes a very strong week of theatergoing for The Stages of MN. Conceived and written by the three Artistic Directors of The Moving Company, Dominique Serrand, Nathan Keepers, and Steven Epp, it is a unique work of art. My plus one for the show was Nala, a young coworker of mine who hadn’t seen live theater in a long time. Exactly the audience theaters would love to engage with. I always say the trick to creating new regular theatergoers is to take them to see a show they love, and they will want to repeat the experience. The Moving Company was a gamble in this respect. The company’s original works often challenge the audience to interpret what they are experiencing rather than simply spoon-feeding them a traditional plot. That is certainly the case with Memento Vivere: Remember to Live. Would this be inscrutable? Would this be the show that put Nala off theater for another few years? Happily, it was a perfect balance of ideas, humor, striking imagery and movement, captivating performances, and the kind of theater one wants to experience again. Nala and I both loved it, and I predict she will be a repeat plus oner, which will hopefully evolve into a lifelong regular theatergoer.

Opening with the sound and projections of rainfall, the show segues into beautiful music and the appearance of the cast, who enter the audience’s view like worms appearing after the heavens have drenched the earth, slithering and rolling along the stage floor. Then arms reach up like the dead returning from the grave. The cast gradually gains its feet, rummages through bags, and emerges clothed. They are proclaimed to be gravediggers and go through rituals of burying things they have found so they will remember them. The piece moves from nonverbal to halting, short bursts of dialogue to full-on storytelling of the classic Greek tragedy trilogy, the Oresteia plays.

The play is littered with Easter eggs designed to give the audience launching points from which to interpret the work. This is the very opposite of the Twin Cities Horror Festival show Evidence: Silence Experiments, that I was rather hard on last month. Where that was an untraditional piece that was aggressively inaccessible, here they are constantly feeding you ideas, movements, and quotes to draw you toward an understanding of their art. But there is also room for everyone to interpret things in their own way. The difference is that these artists know precisely what every line means to them, what every gesture and movement symbolizes. There is nothing that isn’t thought out and have a concrete meaning to the performers. we may not interpret it in the same way, but we can sense there is purpose in everything.

There is the imagery of the worms, the ideas of the gravediggers, and multiple quotes from Hamlet, including some of the jokes from the Gravedigger scene. This reminds us of Shakespeare’s idea of the worm being the great equalizer: upon death, it feeds on the King and the common man alike. There is a character who calls himself Pupa, and another who is a Phoenix. He is born, dies, and is reborn, his height is measured on a upturned coffin lid with lines marking dates in history from the present back to Jesus and even earlier to the times of Hobbits. At a point in the show that characters decide what story they will tell that night, implying that one is told every night.

For me, the show is about art: how it endures, how it is for everyone, how we reinterpret and rediscover it, and how important it is to remember it, to make it part of our lives. Art is a reflection of life, and the title of the show reminds us to remember to live. The conclusion echoes Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with each character proclaiming which piece of literature they are. The point of that story was that, in the face of a fascist society, humans keep art alive by each remembering a book. They become that book, and when the written word is burned, the art survives in the oral tradition.

How the company conveys these ideas and engages the audience so completely is due, in no small part, to the ensemble cast being extraordinarily in tune with each other and extremely disciplined in their attention to the precision of their movements. The Moving Company’s tagline is “theatre that moves.” Many of the cast have trained all over the world with some of the great clowning schools. Which brings us to the aspect of the show that I haven’t really touched on yet, which is the humor. In the opening five minutes of the 90-minute, no-intermission show (God, isn’t that a wonderful phrase?), my thoughts were: this is a striking production. But if they roll around on the ground and don’t speak for the entire show, no amount of sound and lighting design can make that interesting for an hour and a half. But it progresses from visual storytelling to dialogue, and as their voices come into the show more and more, the humor, both physical and verbal, blossoms as well.

I’ve written before of the question I always ask my plus ones after a show: Who was your favorite performer? Nala answered by going through the entire cast, not by name, as she didn’t reference the program, but in the end, she had acknowledged all of them. They are Kenzi Allen, Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, Tracey Maloney, Anna Schloerb, and Luverne Seifert. I could not agree more; there is no way to choose. That is because every player is a vital part of what makes this show work. They are all in sync to a degree that is rare in theater. They are all pieces of a larger whole; without one of them, the thing would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, evaporating, unable to hold its form.

Memento Vivere: Remember to Live is a stunningly beautiful illustration of theater as art. Art that speaks to ideas while also entertaining, that realizes laughter, like your worm, is the great equalizer. The Moving Company uses every tool in the toolbox, not just movement and dialogue, to create a work that is utterly captivating. Sound and scenic design by Dominique Serrand and John Novak involves piles of dirt scattered around the stage, which become graves for things we must remember. Lighting design by Marcus Dilliard expertly helps to modulate the mood of the show. Costumes by Sonya Berlovitz and props by John Novak, Nathan Keepers, and Steven Epp create a sense of a patchwork world of animals and man, of the past and of the future.

Memento Vivere: Remember to Live runs through November 22nd at The Southern Theater in Minneapolis. For more information and to purchase tickets go to https://www.themovingco.org/

Don’t forget to keep an eye on the new website  79 Seconds on Stage a free and full guide to local theatre in the Twin Cities.

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