“I’m sitting in a cab and the seats are upholstered in cold plastic-y leather with thick black seat belts that only go around the waist. I’m sitting in a big black leather sofa chair. I am sitting in chairs,” reads an excerpt of “Mental Furniture,” coming this Friday to S.P.A.C.E.
Tyler Prinz, a second-year performing arts graduate student, is the writer and actor behind the show — you could almost consider him a one-man band. He plays the only character in the performance.
“I was first introduced to solo performance in my undergrad at Columbia College Chicago. Every year, as part of our year-end urban arts festival, the solo performance class performed their short four to six minute pieces back to back,” says Prinz, who says the solo performances piqued his interest in the genre.
Prinz finally decided to take the solo performance class during his senior year at Columbia with actor and performance artist, Stephanie Shaw before performing his short piece during the urban arts festival.
But what exactly is solo performance?
Prinz explains that solo performance is “almost like performance art meeting theater … Ultimately the text [is] derived from the actor’s autobiographical experience and crafted to the ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ or ultimate goal they want the audience to take away from it.”
The idea behind solo performance in relation to traditional theatre is that it “removes the artifice of what theatre is often assumed to hold” by filling the void between the audience and what is happening on the stage. This happens through the use of a single actor telling a story to the audience — but the story isn’t a character’s story, it’s that of the actor himself.
During Prinz’s time as a graduate student, he has continued to work in solo performance with Spaulding Grey and Holly Hughes through Kathryn Walat’s contemporary drama class. “Delving deeper into the topic further [during classes], I knew … I wanted to explore [it] as my thesis.”
The one-hour piece directed by Hope Hargrove explores the idea of “how individuals from our emotional lives become part of a person’s emotional history,” or, as Prinz calls it, “mental furniture.”
Through the narrative of a relationship with a long-term boyfriend, Prinz hopes the audience can relate to some aspect of his experience and apply it to their own lives — and maybe even analyze what it actually means to “take a seat.”
For more information, visit the event’s Facebook page.
