My Weekend With Celine Song
A last minute play viewing and I finally watched Past Lives
This past Friday was one of those miserable work days where I was reminded that I am but a cog in the machine. My temporary salvation was getting my hands on a last minute ticket for that evening’s showing of the sold-out play FAMILY, written by Celine Song. Even though truthfully all I wanted to do was sit on my couch, eat ice cream, and cry, I said, fuck it. This is exactly what I came to New York for.
After purchasing my ticket, I was given the direction to meet the other audience members at a then-disclosed bar twenty minutes before showtime. I people watched (now a pre-show ritual, it seems), noting young people around my age — solo and in friend groups, dressed like they were interested in the arts in some capacity but not quite sure to what extent yet — and eclectic older couples who greeted each other like native New Yorkers, each comfortable in the style of their own subculture — bohemian, punk, soho elite — tied together by being in the know of the current art scene.
We were herded like children on a school field trip through the neighborhood to a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone apartment, past a gate, and carefully led downstairs to the basement level. When I say this home was gorgeous, I mean it. Shining wooden floors, a grand piano, long dining table, flowers and wooden chimes, and a record player sitting atop a shelf that could have been pulled straight out of Architectural Digest.1 Yet at the same time, it felt lived in and perfectly homey, through smaller touches like mail strewn across a coffee table and the fact that some folks watched the play directly from the living room couch. An assortment of around twenty five chairs and various seating lined the walls for rest of the audience.
Presented by the theater company, Hoi Polloi, FAMILY follows the story of three half-siblings returning to the home they live in together after their father’s funeral. The home, built by their father, feels like just as important of a character as our three protagonists.
David (Luis Feliciano), Alice (Violet Savage), and Linus (Jonah O’Hara-David) spend the straight hour and a half running, jumping, dancing, doing push-ups, bending their bodies, and throwing themselves on the ground, to the point that we can see the sweat glistening on their faces from the front row. At times, we hear them from different rooms. To my amusement and delight, I watch Linus brushing his teeth and Alice with a shower cap on “scrubbing” her pits in the shower in the bathroom as they shout to David in the living room. Another time, I hear only David’s voice, out of my seat view, as he tinkers around in the kitchen and runs around the backyard, yelling like a chicken with its head cut off. The actors make use of hidden floorboards, hollow bench seats and wall cabinets, an eerie skylight, and stairs leading above us only to further extend the scene. And depending on where you are sitting, you’ll get to have a completely different experience of the play.
Throughout, Alice repeatedly says the three of them were “born and raised in” this house. She hears voices from the pipes and we also hear a faint buzzing sound coming from the walls, the house itself almost alive and haunting the characters into near insanity, and suffocating the audience in moments of complete darkness. Perhaps my favorite part of the show was when Alice reappears after going under ground, revealing a dark secret about herself that her mother has passed down to her, and essentially playing two different characters in conversation with each other, managing to both terrify me and make me want to laugh, all in one go with her impressive body acting. The life and death cycle of the house — and their inescapable family trauma — continues as the siblings make a surprising discovery of what lays in the crawlspace beneath the home and again at the end, when new life is introduced into the home, doomed to repeat history.
FAMILY was truly the spooky prelude I needed entering October and left me clambering back up to street level in a daze.
True to my texts, I streamed Past Lives (2023) on Saturday and was blown away at Song’s artistic range. From avant-garde experimental theater to intimate indie film darling. Besides the fact that I love auto-fiction because I am both very nosy and fascinated by the relationship between artists and their art, I still can’t believe it took me so long to watch a film that literally feels made for me. In Past Lives, the protagonist, Nora, is caught between the what if of a relationship and life with a former childhood friend in South Korea and the current reality of a relationship and life with her white husband in New York. The movie was so touching and real, and left tears running down my face at multiple points.2
I’ve spent a lot of time day dreaming at different points over the years — most often during family trips to India — of what my life would look like now if my parents hadn’t decided to immigrate to the States soon after I was born. In that life, I wouldn’t be fumbling over my words in Bengali as I spoke to my relatives. I’d be confidently running around the city using public transit, maybe even still working in the entertainment industry, and picking up groceries for the family as I returned to our intergenerational home in the evenings.
I even went so far as starting to write a fictional story a couple years ago exploring that very topic that so many children of immigrants have in the back of their minds as they decide where to commit to growing their roots. Watching Past Lives, it was nice to viscerally feel that I am not alone in that feeling. And it was just beautifully shot.
I absolutely cannot wait to see what Song makes next, and in the meantime I think I might need to watch her rendition of Anton Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, performed on Sims 4…which is a sentence I could have never imagined myself saying a week ago.
Until next time! xoxo
Literal props to set design consultant, Mimi Lien.
I guess I did get my cry session in after all!