Audi-Turgy
Anything but Spectacle
A play about superheroes conjures wild images of smoke and magic and special effects. Of a masked man, transformed by the bite of a spider, who stuns audiences with his supersized acrobatics and feats of flight. This is what we have come to expect, largely due to recent Broadway pageantry and our apparent fascination with superhero films. (According to IMDB, four of the top five highest-grossing box office hits in the US are about superheroes, loosely defined: Avatar, The Avengers, The Dark Knight, and Star Wars.) But there’s a play this season that challenges those expectations. A play that that allows us to go beyond the masks and reveals a world of ordinary people trying to make a difference. A play that embraces the lack of spectacle.
Reals by Gwydion Suilebhan, which will receive its World Premiere at Theater Alliance on August 27, is an honest and exciting investigation into the world of superheroes. Suilebhan, a DC-native, started writing Reals several years ago when he was struck by our superhero-obsessed culture, particularly in films. “I asked myself, why are we spending so much money on a superhero movie?” he says. “Why do we, as a culture, need this trope? Why are we craving it so badly?” As he was investigating these questions, trying to figure out what is behind our apparent fascination with heroes and villains and why there are so few of these stories on stage, he discovered a startling offshoot of this phenomenon: real-life superheroes.
Real-life superheroes, or “reals” as Suilebhan calls them, actually exist, but at the time they hadn’t yet made headlines in the media or appeared on YouTube, and weren’t very widely known. And yet Suilebhan became consumed by the little information he could find about a world of ordinary citizens who dress up and either do good deeds or fight crime. “What is it in the psychology of a human being that makes them put on a costume, train expensively, and actually go out into dangerous neighborhoods…and protect people?” he asks. “What does it take to make a person into that?” He was hooked.
But what is so innovative, and ultimately powerful, about Reals is its deep connection to reality. “This isn’t some silly other world,” notes Theater Alliance Artistic Director Colin Hovde. “These are real people. This really does happen . . . truth is stranger than fiction, and this is a great example of that.” We all imagine ourselves to be superheroes at some point in our lives, as Suilebhan likes to point out, and in Reals we see only slight extremes of ourselves on stage. We’ve all wondered, “What if I could fly? What if I could just punch that guy?” Suilebhan explains. “We all have this desire for power, and that’s really what this play is about: investigating what’s in all of us that makes us want to become a superhero, and the dark and light sides of that.”
Admittedly some of Suilebhan’s characters go above and beyond what any of us might ordinarily do, and there are certainly heightened elements of fun in the 90-minute ride. Tightly choreographed fighting, stunning costumes, and a surprise ending will keep even the action film buff hooked. But at its heart, Reals is more about being fallible than a superhuman. “This play deals with very personal aspects of how we perceive ourselves and how we can actually grow as human beings,” says Hovde. Reals is about everyday people, about questions of identity and truth, about the façades each and every one of us wear. Reals is anything but spectacle.
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