Someone Spectacular, 16 August 2024

Someone Spectacular followed the journey of six diverse members of a grief support group on a day that their facilitator, Beth, did not show up. Each character struggled with their own private shame and put up a different defense mechanism. In the end, the play emphasized the power of peers and not being alone with your pain, and suggested that healing doesn’t necessitate professional help; it can occur through the kindness of others reaching across the metaphorical aisle to see another person’s inherent humanity, even when they are at an all time low point themselves.

In a room like this, everybody had a secret and everybody had an attitude. In a way, it was like seeing multiple archetypes of loss in each character so the effect of how many different ways to grieve there are was magnified. In a way there were many more characters on stage than the six actors portraying them. In another sense though, there were fewer. Even in a group of six, each individual could not have a distinct story. They had commonalities that made it seem like there were less than six unique ways to grieve— in a way, there was only one.

This big picture duality road the heals of playwright Domenica Feraud’s deliberate construction of losses for each character that were vague, generic, and universal. The most specific story in the show was that of Jude (Delia Cunningham), and the loved one she’d lost was a miscarried baby— someone she had never really interacted with. The least specific was that of Nelle (Alison Cunningham) who lost a sister who had been her closest family for her entire life, but the discussion of what that sister meant to her was simply someone to text. 

All of the grievers straddled the line between performative and profoundly real with expertise, and the overall picture the show painted thrived on duality— juxtaposing dignity and hysteria, acceptance and defiance, control and loss if it, collective pain and individual pain, calmness and madness, specificity and universality, togetherness and loneliness, need of a leader and need to be aimless— all of the contradictions that are grief. It’s nonlinear. It’s never ending. It’s traumatic. It’s a relief.

And as for the show? It’s funny. It’s emotional. It’s beautiful.

I saw this production on a press pass from Blake Zidell & Associates.