Deb Margolin's '8 Stops' at SEI Innovation Studio

Her son fears death, and so she reads him a book about the secret lives of deer. We learn that deer and bees kill many more people than sharks. (I looked it up, of course, and learned that hippos are even more dangerous, but not in this country.) We’re asked to contemplate what deer eat and how precarious their lives are and by extension, our own.

Why do we go to see a one-person show? To watch someone exposed and raw before us, or to find some healing, some way through our own troubles? Perhaps a bit of both. Margolin exposes her pain, forcing us to confront our own. Why did she create this show? I eavesdrop afterward as she tells a group of Swarthmore students, “tell the story you can’t die without having told.”

We’ve seen a lot of Chekhov and Ibsen this year — plays about people yearning for the lives they do not have. Margolin doesn’t long and pine; she looks ahead and “seeks the joy” in a life filled with challenges. If she longs for anything, it is perhaps for a normal life beyond the pain.

The show in many ways is a feat of endurance. At an hour and three quarters, there is no rest for performer or audience. It’s compelling and engaging. Margolin’s use of language is sometimes just beyond reach. Phrases resonate and return, “suffering from the grief of endless compassion,” “death is like an idiom,” “ambition is an immune response to mortality.”

When life gets tough, Margolin makes bargains with herself. She declares she’s not suicidal, but when she’s had enough of the party, she says, it is okay to leave. She’ll kill herself after. . .after any of the things that make life worth living at the moment. When she gets the Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis, her husband takes her out to dinner and she rages against the normal people around her who probably play golf.

She lives in a town — Montvale, NJ, “is it a mountain or is it a valley? What is it?” she asks — filled with annoying people who seem to intrude just when life is at its toughest. They don’t invite her to their parties, they let her raise their children when they can’t be bothered — yet she can laugh at them, fighting back by leaving doughnuts at their doors.

The minimal set allows us to know when Margolin is at home (in a living room filled with stuffed animals, all named and with back stories, she assures us, and a large tree bedecked with ornaments jutting into the room) or in the hospital (indicated by fluorescent lights, a nest of tangled IV tubes, and an IV bag on a pole that she clings to while she tries to hang on). A simple tug of a curtain and a spotlight and she’s presenting at a conference on grief that never quite gets going.

"The death thing"

I feel like I’m watching a real person work through the experiences of her life so that she can conclude that she loves her life with all its challenges. She takes on the characters of her son wrestling with “the death thing” and that neighbor who just won’t let her get home to her child.

It is impossible to keep your distance. Chekhov packages his people in orderly environments, while Margolin’s set is disordered; the tangled IV tubing, the tree in the living room. In Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Masha dresses up as Snow White — a princess confronting the wicked Queen. Margolin isn’t a princess; she lives in chaos and invites us in as well, not as dwarves and servants to do her bidding, but as witnesses to endurance.

The title comes from a story she tells at the end about seeing a young boy on the subway who is moving to this country to live with his father and a new mother, and she wants to let him know he is loved before they all get off the train in eight stops. And this is where, for me, the performance piece falls short. Given that 8 Stops is the title, I kept waiting to understand what those eight stops might be — perhaps something like the stages of grief? I wanted a structure to hold all this together. While I never lost interest, I also often felt lost.

Despite the show's length, the audience was engrossed, and even though Margolin held the script in her hand and referred to it at times, the performance transcended that. Do I know Margolin after this show? It feels like I do, but perhaps this is just one of those moments where our stories intersect, and we go on our way one degree less apart than we were before this evening.

How much can you change a life in eight stops on a subway train? Not much or maybe completely, and irreversibly. Were we changed by our time with her, maybe not, and then again, as everything we touch changes us, maybe yes. Maybe we will go home and talk to our garbage as we send it out into the vast sea of detritus that floods our planet, maybe we’ll name our stuffed animals, maybe we’ll get revenge on our enemies by giving them gifts of sweetness. Maybe we’ll never learn how to stave off grief, but we can discover the surprising extent to which we can endure whatever comes our way.

Note: The show grew out of the Kimmel Center Theater Residency held this year with Dael Orlandersmith, a poet and performance artist, who worked with seven actor/playwrights to create performance pieces.