The Catholic Church can be a dizzying mix of contradictions: odd gender roles and familiar ritual, conservative norms and warm gathering. How to reconcile the helpful with the very much not?
Theater is its own ritual, and act of gathering, and artist Emily/Bubeck aims to maximize that potential in My Body is Falling Apart. Not a “play” in the traditional sense — but so much more in the exciting one — My Body is Falling Apart fuses acts, music, and found poetry to examine the impact faith and perceived norms had on one body, but perhaps on yours too. The play’s producer, Breaking & Entering Theatre Collective, is dedicated to carving out space in nontraditional venues to share art and connect audiences. Radical welcome is key to not just hospitality but generating new work.
Dashing around Brooklyn venues and beyond, the play presents four times in the next two weeks, including at local institutions Pete’s Candy Store and The Brick Aux. Tickets are now available, and below Greenpointers chatted with Emily about the new piece.
Greenpointers: Your play, my body is falling apart and i’m not sure what to do anymore, has a sharp title — how do you describe it to people?
Emily/Bubeck: It isn’t really a piece of theater, but a reimagining of the Catholic Mass. Using old journals, we’ve cobbled together found poetry that I’ve written over the past 11 years, and Xander Browne has graciously set some of these pieces to music to bring this ritual to life. As the title might suggest, we are using this piece to try and process the trauma that we’re carrying in our bodies. It’s easy for all of us to identify the trauma caused by religious institutions (particularly the Catholic church!), but sometimes that makes it too easy for us to discard our spiritual practice completely. This piece offers a moment of spiritual community that isn’t tied to that trauma.
You are taking the work around to a number of lovely venues in Brooklyn and beyond. Many of these are special and intimate spaces; does that feel true to the piece?
It feels more than true, it feels necessary to make this piece work! There are multiple opportunities for audience involvement (none of them are required, don’t let that scare you away from the show!), and I don’t think it would be possible to orchestrate them in a true proscenium-style space. I’m really thrilled to see how each location informs and transforms the piece, and how we can build something “sacred” in these various spaces that are already so beloved in the indie theater community.
Talk to us about lining up performances at these varied venues.
I’ve been producing theater in New York City since 2019 and, as a working-class artist with an Appalachian background, my access to capital is pretty fucking limited. The most expensive part of producing theater in this city, in my experience, is paying for a venue. In producing Breaking & Entering’s Rooftop Reading Series, however, I’ve found many venues across the city with reasonable rates, and for the past few years I’ve been ideating on what an “in-town tour” would look like as a potential producing model.
None of my artists were particularly game to be a guinea pig for the idea, so I thought my own work would be a good place to test the model. We cast a wide net when first planning, reaching out to bars, cafes, and even the Parks Department in addition to the spaces that made the final roster. We are in a unique position because the tech needs for this show are so minimal, we could have made any space work. If we had gone with a traditional week long theater rental, we would’ve paid somewhere between $2-5K and with this model we were able to keep our combined performance and rehearsal space costs under $1,200.
How would you describe what audiences will see? Is it a workshop, a piece in development, a full production? Some combination or all of the above?
I would definitely classify this as a bit of all the above! I deal exclusively with new work, and I genuinely don’t believe there is ever a “final draft” of a play. With this piece we are, in a way, renegotiating the space between performer and audience (like your own work does, Billy!) and for that reason I think it will feel less like a full production to the audience, merely because of the immediacy and intimacy of the work. We really don’t want this to be the end of the road for the piece, but we don’t have future plans for it just yet. We are still building the physical vocabulary for the world; this is the first time we’re presenting it as something-more-than-a-reading-behind-music-stands and we’re really excited to see how our use of the space informs the audience’s experience of the ritual.
What themes or experiences drew you to this work, if you feel comfortable discussing?
Like most American women, I developed an eating disorder during my pre-teen years, and my relationship with my body has always been fraught. My grandmother, Mawmaw, passed away from cancer when I was a senior in high school and she was always a beacon of spirituality for me, an example of how to rise above the bullshit, if you will. I was so wrapped up in my grief for her and trying to navigate my spirituality without her that I barely noticed my other grandmother, Nana, was falling deeper and deeper into Alzheimer’s. I watched their bodies and minds decay while, in real time, I could feel the physical consequences of my eating disorder begin to manifest. Oh, and I was also going through a pretty gnarly break up when [director and dramaturg] Molly Van Der Molen and I began puzzling this piece together. I could somehow feel, not cognizantly but in my body, that all of the pain I was walking through was connected, not only to each other but to all of the joy and love and light I have experienced in this lifetime. Building this piece allowed me to process some of those feelings, and the hope is that participating in this ritual will be a step towards healing for all of us.
Thank you! Anything else you want to add?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you can still donate to this project! Tax-deductible contributions can be made here. I also want to give a huge shout out to Molly, without whom this piece never would have made it on to the page, let alone the stage; and Henry Lombino for helping us bring this iteration of the show to life.