[20040067] I Was Here

I Was Here

Your Mama Productions @ Weimar Room

6:00pm, Sat 6 Mar 2004

Score: 8

Short Review: Intriguing…

I Was Here is essentially just an arrangement of comments made on the doors and walls of women’s toilets around the globe. This may sound like a piss-poor premise for a bit of theatre, but it actually came across rather well.

Using three actors to repeat the same text over and over, with different delivery each time, was really quite an intriguing idea. There’s only a total of about 5 minutes of dialogue in the whole piece, but each iteration makes it sound fresh. The only exception was the statement “I made Ian kill himself. I am so sorry”; this was always poignant, as were the supportive followup statements.

All the while, the three girls roamed the black stage with paint pens, spreading graffiti as they went. And the statements used were rarely crude (as is the case of 98% of graffiti in male toilets), but often inquisitive, informative (“grammar’s not just a party trick”), or supportive. A real eye-opening thinker of a show; masterfully done.