Notes on: The Changelings (PACT)
I found the building round a hairpin bend above the Erskineville train line. The bitumen roads were agleam with all that pellucid, sliding beauty the rain-washed night throws up when council hasn’t stinted on street lighting, and the cars keep moseying up and along, bouncing their robot eye-beams, going somewhere. Huffing out dragon vapours into the dewy night air because I never can resist, ogling my own mystical emissions cross-eyed, I made my uncertain way to this place I’d never been where The Changelings would have its final night.
[Those looking for information about the show can skip the preceding paragraph and begin after this one ends. I’m just trying to warm myself up into this thing because I’m writing it a fair amount of time after I saw the show, having been requested to say a few words by the PR folk because… I don’t know. Weird how some words matter. How to say them true.]
I’ve seen plenty bad one-person shows and I’ve seen plenty-ish good ones, and I am happy to report that The Changelings – the strange and magnificent child of a strange and magnificent child of a strange and magnificent mother, well. It’s plenty good.
With a wonderfully virtuosic sermon-rock live score by Bonnie Stewart and Micaela Ellis, there’s an elemental, impishly freewheeling and completely fearless spirit soaring through this coming-of-age story. It is one that is true, too, to thirty-something writer and performer Charlotte Salusinszky’s life. With a production that equals her uncontainable spirit, she tells and sings of her unknowable mother, of her experiences as an adult being born again, and then later being borne again into a different kind of spirituality and (bi)sexuality and self.
It was inspired by Freaky Friday, that body-swap comedy from 2003, in which mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter (Lindsay Lohan) can only come to understand each other (a bit) after some consciousness juggling. This Freaky Friday conceptual connection is a loose one, though, and very much a point from which Salusinszky leaps. At the heart The Changelings, I think, it is a quest to find meaning and cobble oneself together after loss – of community, faith, people, touchstones, certainties. How to find grace in the cognitive dissonance that follows? How to grieve? How to nurture what good endures from a residual, dissonant past.
Things from the show that will stay with me:
The red ute! Like, an actual full-sized car. Sitting to the side of the tiered seating and broad stage, the first thing that you see when you open PACT’s foyer door to the performance space, it’s a kind of portal to the show itself. Salusinszky will clamber inside it, and clamber on top of it, and honk its horn. Like many things about this show, it was almost unreal, an apparition.
Salusinszky looking like a kind of faerie 80s rockstar David Bowie, a pastiche of ruffles and styles and boiling ringletted hair.
Musicians Bonnie Stewart and Micaela Ellis in similar, if less outrageous, garb. They hold centre stage, drums and keyboard arrayed around them. Blurred in parti-colour mists that call to mind a nightclub in a church, they are the musical centre of gravity to the ricocheting whirlwind of our main performer. They’re not just back-up, they’re integral. And hugely talented, too.
The way that Salusinszky flung herself about that space, jumping against the walls, dancing and rolling on the floor, climbing up to the second storey balcony, and just being… completely uninhibited in the way only a theatre kid can be. Because of the way she used it, my memory of the space is, I am sure, far larger than what the space measures in its actual dimensions.
Her observation, delivered almost in passing, on how representations of the Virgin Mary have changed over time. Her once powerful stance (which Salusinszky demonstrates) with upraised arms and unlowered gaze have over the centuries folded inwards into the demure iconography of the nurturer, the self-sacrificing carer.
The way the breath left my body for a second when the light poured in. (See the production photo at the top of this page for a clue.)
The humour and grace of Salusinszky’s meta device to restore that breath by pausing the show, and getting the audience to participate in a communion of fairy bread, passed around in tiny plastic cups. There isn’t a time that isn’t right for eating fairy bread.
The Jesus Room. This was a room set aside in the house Salusinszky shared with her ultra-religious, kind-hearted sisters during her time as a believer. It wasn’t a spare room, it was Jesus’s own room. It is given representation in the performance as seen through a half-open door at the back of the stage. And then later in the show, out of the room, rolling mists that crept across the wooden floor.
The story of how she and her mother danced at a wedding, not to the music being played on the speakers, but to the rhythm of the far-off cicadas…
PACT’s production – lighting, costumes, sound – was a toweringly ambitious feat for indie theatre. I don’t give stars on this personal sandpit-playing site of mine, but if I did, let’s just say I would give The Changelings many stars. Salusinszky is in a firmament of her own, incandescent with her own strange light.
Photography: Philip Erbacher
