Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as we know, but it’s hard to think of many that are as profoundly, performatively, tragically unhappy as David Cale’s.
The good news, such as it is, is that Cale’s childhood misfortune has yielded We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time, a beautiful, moving, and ultimately deeply engaging one-man biomusical that opened tonight at the Public Theater.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Cale has a long résumé in New York theater as a performer, singer, actor and composer. He’s created and performed several previous solo shows, and he wrote Billy Crudup’s recent one-man sensation, Harry Clarke. In We’re Only Alive, he brings all his skills to bear on the story of his own unfortunate childhood. He wrote the script and lyrics, and he cowrote the lush, lyrical music with Matthew Dean Marsh.
The playing space in the Public’s intimate, thrust-stage Anspacher Theater is left black and bare, with a stool, music stand, and microphone sitting slightly off center. A half-dozen or so bird cages hang overhead, and then Cale, trim and bald, enters, singing of birds. “Canada Geese/ Over the hillside/ Canada Geese/ Flying so high/ How do they know/ Where they are going?”
Birds will be a motif of this play, because this is a play about escape.
Cale perches himself on the stool and begins to recount his story. He’s got a sing-songy sort of English accent and an awkward, jumpy manner, with his arms and legs jutting about. On that stool, he seems much like a Muppet. He begins by telling whimsical tales of his childhood, in a nice house on the edge of an industrial town, with rolling hills behind it. A solitary child in an unhappy house where mum and dad didn’t get along, he wandered in those hills and fell in love with the animals—so much so that he converted the family shed into a Bird and Animal Hospital, and he cared for wounded animals he discovered. But he found his true passion with birds, eventually breeding over 300 of them.
Those birds were something for him to love, and they were also a metaphor for escape. (His younger brother built model airplanes.)
Cale is a droll storyteller, and his songs are pretty and haunting. It’s a cliché that characters in musicals break into song when mere words are insufficient, and it’s never seemed more true than in We’re Only Alive. Cale sings of his loneliness, of his desire for escape, of how horrible he found his hometown, Luton. He also shifts perspectives, telling parts of his family story as his alcoholic father, or his repressed mother, or his wealthy, controlling, mobbed-up grandfather.
So far, so good. It’s all entertaining, and well-executed, but it also feels like a million solo shows, the sad childhood, the multiple voices, the need to escape. It risks becoming pleasant but uninteresting.
But then Cale calmly mentions how much worse things got, and everything clicks into place. All the devices he has set up—the shifting perspectives, the plaintive songs, the firm setting in his hometown and within the defined personalities of his family—carry his story forward with a new urgency. I don’t want to spoil anything, but what’s most important is that he uses the very modern construct he has developed to tell a story that, while set in the last decades of the 20th century, seems more Victorian than (second) Elizabethan.
It makes for an emotionally rich and resonant tale that, while it ends exactly as one expects it must—with him flying away to New York, to stand on his own and find happiness—remains surprising, moving, and totally engrossing.
This is Cale’s story, and his accomplishment. But the staging makes it so much more. The six-piece orchestra, hidden behind a scrim and heard before it is seen, plays his music beautifully and helps keep us firmly planted, even through some of the horrors Cale describes, in a sort of storytelling netherworld, removed from our real lives but also removed from the world Cale describes. Director Robert Falls, the artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which is coproducing with the Public and where the piece premiered, has Cale moving about the stage, adding visual dynamism without ever overwhelming the simplicity of the storytelling. Similarly, the work of scenic designer Kevin Depinet, costume designer Paul Marlow, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, and sound designer Mikhail Fiksel is all perfectly, elegantly unobtrusive. Matthew Dean Marsh arranged and conducts the score he co-composed.
At the end of the play, Cale tells of traveling back home many years later. He visits the factory his grandfather owned, where his father and mother both worked and both wilted. He finds that it is now an arts center. For Cale, art was salvation; perhaps it will be for his hometown, and his family’s story, too.
We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time opened June 27, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through July 14. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
