I Came to Look for You on Tuesday. La MaMa E.T.C. (see Off-Off Broadway). By Chiori Miyagawa. Dir. Alice Reagan. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
I Came to Look for You on Tuesday: In brief
Chiori Miyagawa explores themes of catastrophe and reunion in this tale of one woman's long journey to connect with her father, inspired by a series of salons that she and director Alice Reagan held with artists and others.
I Came to Look for You on Tuesday: Theater review by Helen Shaw
All the extra-theatrical material surrounding I Came to Look for You on Tuesday—discussions, pop-up art, a series of salons—may strike you as irrelevant to Chiori Miyagawa's moving anthology-drama about loss. Texturally, though, the sense of peripheral flotsam actually accentuates the piece's tidal nature. Each of Tuesday's disasters (tornado, tsunami, war) drags families apart, so—inevitably and symmetrically—survival becomes the attempt to rush back together.
In short scenes, jumbled out of sequence, we may see a father (Ugo Chukwu) looking fruitlessly for his son or a grown survivor of the same tragedy (McKenna Kerrigan) talking to her mother's ghost. Reunions are frequent, though rarely between the living. You must ignore ugly mise en scène (Jiyoun Chang's intriguing gray hallway is ruined by an ill-lit, unnecessary projection backdrop), and director Alice Reagan doesn't always keep her bathetic impulses under control. But taken as a whole, the piece is wonderfully tidy; its stories don't end happily, yet somehow we leave having been swept clean.
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