The Hundred We Are

The North American Premiere of The Hundred We Are by Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri took place at the Cell and was directed by Erwin Maas. The space provided an intimate atmosphere by bringing the actors closer to the audience and placing them at our eye-level, which made the experience very personal.

photo by Sara Krulwich

Three actresses in the play represent different stages in the life of a woman whose journey we are witnessing from birth until death. There is the rebellious teenage side of her (Mirirai Sithole), an unbalanced middle age incarnation (Orlagh Cassidy) and an old woman (Kitty Chen). All three coexist and interact, referring to themselves as “we”. The third actress plays other people but doesn’t speak until the end of the play. All the talking for her is done by the Shadow (Caitlyn Cisco).

The camera sits in a corner while live streaming a wide angle shot of the audience that is projected on the wall above the “stage”. Occasionally one of the actresses grabs the camera and walks with it to the upper level of the space, talking to it. The usage of the video seemed unnecessary to me, the costumes by Jenny Green looked like they were bought last moment on sale at Forever 21. But all of it is quickly forgotten and falls down like an onion peel, allowing us to bite into the juicy and flavorful body of the text.

The text of The Hundred We Are, brilliantly translated by Frank Perry is layered, and it interweaves memories with fantasies, dialogs with other people with inner dialogs. It’s filled with poetry. It makes you laugh and cry. One can truly imagine being inside the head of a confused woman. One side of her wants to follow the idealistic dreams of her youth, to help the unprivileged and to write political poetry. The other side is seeking stability in marriage and the career of dental hygienist.

The ethnically diverse cast suggests the universality of the story. The play succeeds in being abstract enough to fit virtually any person experience but doesn’t make you lose interest by pinning some of the experiences with poetic details.

There is also a moment of interfering with reality in the show of which I only read afterwards in the New York Times review. In the director’s note, Ervin Maas says: “Little did we know that some of the themes of the piece would play out in our creative and development process. (…) Only days before opening we arrived at a point of no return: how do we move forward and deal with these frustrating, yet honest obstacles of not remembering?”

While reading the program before the show, I didn’t realize that these words refer to the fact that Kitty Chen, who played Actress 3, had trouble remembering her lines. That’s why the character of Shadow was added to the cast. That’s why there was a projection of the text on the wall behind the audience as a teleprompter. That didn’t bother me at all as my eyes were on stage and I quickly forgot about it.

There was a moment when Mirirai Sithole stumbled in her lines but instead of moving forward as if nothing happened as it usually done in the theater, she started to walk, drawing more attention to what is happening and unraveling the knot of lines: “She said that and that and now…” arriving to the place in the text where it snapped.

That threw me off for a second but suited the mood of the play. Some memories run smoothly as a filmstrip and you have no problem replaying them in your head again and again, much like your favorite stories to tell, much like theater show. But theater also has a sporadic element in it, which shows that it’s a process of constant work and making decisions. As Ervin Mass writes in his Director’s Note regarding the problems they faced in rehearsals, there are two choices: “1. To hide the struggles most of us have (…) or 2. To run towards these embarrassments and instead openly explore and address them”.