Natural Shocks @ Echo Theatre
Photo at left by Zach Huggins
—Jan Farrington
This might be one of the shorter reviews I’ll ever write. Lauren Gunderson’s play Natural Shocks: A One-Woman Play in a Tornado is well worth 75 minutes of your time—but I’m trying not to say too much about it.
A woman locks herself in her basement, terrified of an approaching tornado. She’s an expert on risks and dangers, for reasons she’ll tell us, but doesn’t seem entirely focused on the approaching storm. She has the satisfaction, she says, of “knowing what’s coming—but no one believes me.”
Solo shows are a special challenge: Sasha Maya Ada directs this one well, and actor Liz Sankarsingh’s portrait of “Angela” holds our attention. She’s on high alert, chugging bottles of water, pacing, and shaking her head about you and me: humans who don’t worry about the stuff that really will kill us. Instead, we[re terrified of airplanes (way safer than cars), and like to believe that “natural” always means good. “Cancer is natural,” says Angela. If she were in charge, “risk literacy” would be taught in school, even to young children—giving them a background in “the science of survival.”
“It’s all statistics until it’s happening to you,” she says flatly. Then the odds are…100% that you’re in a world of hurt.
She talks nonstop, pausing to ask us questions, or to change her story. “I lied about that,” she says more than once. She quotes Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” as a profound, and risky, binary choice we all make—whether (or not) to go on taking the hits from the “thousand natural shocks” of living in this world.
The sounds of the outside storm grow, as does Angela’s fear. Natural Shocks, which premiered in New York in 2018, is a play with edgy connections to an earlier and more comic Gunderson work, 2011’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear.
These are issues that troubled her then, and should (especially after these past few weeks), trouble us all. “I was the warning sign that nobody ever saw,” Angela says, turning to tell us more.
WHEN: May 5-13
WHERE: Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas
WEB: echotheatre.org
