Breathless is a Perfect Fit
Though I’ve had the pleasure to see several shows in 59E59 Theaters’ smallest space, Theater C, the 58 seat black-box never quite seemed appropriate for these prior engagements — the sets were always a little too big and the seats a little too stuffy, my thighs pressed against the strangers’ next to me, wordlessly fighting for an armrest.
That is, until now. Laura Horton’s uncomfortable and engrossing work, which kicks off the 2023 Brits Off-Broadway program, examines the difference between safety and suffocation, comfort and claustrophobia. In Breathless, presented by Theatre Royal Plymouth, the intimate space has found its perfect fit.
As the lights raise and Madonna’s “Vogue” de-crescendos, the audience meets writer Sophie Carter. She’s just begun a fresh chapter, opening up to new life experiences as she closes in on forty, unpacking repressed sides of herself in real time.
Through flashbacks, we follow her increasingly-anxious journey with hoarding as it worsens from adolescence to adulthood. Her shopping-and-storing compulsion has stifled her promising career (she made the Vogue Talent Competition Shortlist in her late twenties) and ruined countless relationships. Finally, a newspaper article about her condition threatens her tenuous equilibrium.
She’s faced with a “Sophie’s Choice” — who, or what, will she give up in the end?
Horton’s writing is so deft and detailed that we barely recognize Sophie’s battle with the compulsion until she’s teetering upon a knife’s edge. The warning signs are there upon reflection, woven through the script like a red string that leads back to the beginning. On her first date with Jo, she presses her finger into the hot candle wax sitting between them.
“As we leave quickly and apologetically,” she says, “I think about taking the nub of the candle, but decide it’s not worth the risk of Jo seeing.”
When Sophie moves home in her early thirties, her parents' faces go white at the sight of the moving truck packed with tetris-like boxes of clothing. “I thought you didn’t have any furniture,” her father says.
“I don’t, Dad,” she responds. They unpack in silence.
Performer Madeleine MacMahon brings Sophie to life in the brilliantly-structured one woman show, popping in and out of multiple characters like a talented high-school forensics performer. Speaking with the lilt of a slam-poet, she gives a stylish, demure and well-intentioned face to a disorder characterized by faceless statistics.
MacMahon is aided by understated technical elements by Associate Lighting Designer Natasha Whitley and Sound Designer Holly Harbottle. The lights shift slightly to denote the passage of time. The score, featuring compositions by Ellie Showering, is a creative hodgepodge of audible breathing and vocal harmony which elevates the show's (sometimes literal) climaxes.
For a show about hoarding, the set is uncharacteristically sparse, housing a cardboard box, a chair, and two racks with several hanging garment bags. Sophie often holds the bags up to the audience and points to imaginary labels: Christian Dior, Stella McCartney, Yves Saint Laurent. Somehow, this only aids the audience in suspension of disbelief — perhaps a testament to Director Stephanie Kempson’s light touch.
Though Sophie’s case is stunningly specific, the questions it raises are universal: what parts of myself are hidden by the things I covet? What things have I kept that I’ve outgrown, or that I purchased without myself in mind? What beautiful versions of myself might I never wear? And, what good might we do when we let others into the mess?
By the denouement, I’ve begun to see myself in Sophie. Judging from the raucous applause, you might, too.
Additional Information:
Theater: 59E59 Theaters, Theater C
Off Broadway, Play
Run Time: 65 minutes, no intermission
Closing: May 7th, 2023