Sarah on theater

I’m a lot better, Doc, I swear! It’s a peculiar, quasi-adversarial experience to have to convince a doctor that you’re okay (or that you’re not), or that you need a medication (or that you don’t). They’re trained to treat you as an unreliable narrator, especially when you go inpatient, and sometimes they’re right to be skeptical. Other times, they aren’t.

Maia Novi’s semi-autobiographical “Invasive Species” is all about this—how a powerful external gatekeeper forces us to navigate this extra layer of social signaling. Novi (also the lead) develops insightful comparisons to an actor trying to realize her director’s vision and an Argentinian immigrant trying to assimilate in America. The doctor may not know what “healthy you” looks like, the director may have a flawed concept of the scene, and the Americans may ask you to erase even the most beautiful parts of your culture. But when they hold the power, it obligates you to say things you don’t exactly mean in ways that you ordinarily wouldn’t—in other words, you have to do a little acting.

The bread-and-butter scenes on that theme are conversations between Maia and various persons of power—schoolmates, the nurse, and so on—eventually hammering home the point with split dialogues where she talks to the doctor and director at the same time. This is wrapped in a brisk 75 minutes of modern chaos, meant to create an atmosphere of mental illness and sow doubt about Maia’s reliability as a narrator: strobing fluorescent lights, the deep pulse of electronic beats, and intrusive fever dreams about other characters and the literal “acting bug.” A real fugue of a fugue state. (I wanted to say that so badly.)

At a surface read, it implies a certain imperviousness to criticism, I guess—if I apply my own idea of a successful piece of theater to someone’s autobiographical show, I’m a lot like that doctor. But writer/star Novi implicitly makes a concession that there’s a role for external vision by employing director Michael Breslin and dramaturg Amauta M. Firmino, among other creatives. And what is theater without an audience to perceive it? On some level, what Novi is really railing against is that communicating abstract ideas to other people is hard and sometimes we have conflicting motivations. The actor may have a better idea than the director for what a scene requires, but she’s also juggling her own desire to be in the movies.

“Invasive Species” came together pretty well for me. I enjoyed the performances, especially Novi, who covers a lot of ground in not a lot of time. (Also really liked her in “Five Models in Ruins, 1981” earlier this year.) Some of the stylized lighting and sound elements were a little much for my taste. The doctor-as-director comparison is genuinely insightful, but when it clicks, the show is over. Maia figures out she needs to act. Maia walks out of the hospital. Blackout.