PostSecret: The Show's message is worthy

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      Created by Frank Warren, TJ Dawe, Kahlil Ashanti, and Justin Sudds. Directed by TJ Dawe. A Firehall Arts Centre production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Tuesday, January 20. Continues until February 7

      At times, I felt like I was on the receiving end of a sermon delivered via Twitter.

      PostSecret: The Show takes its inspiration from Frank Warren’s website, postsecret.com. The website, in turn, grew out of a 2005 project in which Warren invited people to submit—anonymously—decorated postcards that included secrets they’d never shared before. In this stage version of PostSecret, a surprising number of revelations are about farting, but there are also lots about despair (including suicidal thoughts), love, faith, and general quirkiness.

      In PostSecret: The Show, three actors mostly just stand and recite secrets, as well as postings to the website’s chat room. There are other elements, including video clips and live guitar music, but, theatrically, it’s pretty flat.

      The worthy message in PostSecret: The Show is: you are not alone. Whatever weirdness you’ve been up to—and that you may have been shaming yourself for—there’s somebody out there who can relate. When there’s a confessional aspect to the secret, sharing reasserts the fundamental decency of the sharer. I’m thinking, for instance, of the folks who ask forgiveness for bullying.

      Some of this material is beautiful and some of it is very moving. There’s a short piece, for instance, in which a woman remembers that when she was a girl, her father used to put a ladder on their lawn every night and then come back in and tell her that he’d hung the moon in the sky for her. Often, the longer pieces work best because they develop their stories most fully. One such passage begins with this post: “People think that I’m horrible for telling my child there is no Santa. They don’t have to look in their eyes Christmas morning.” The responses in the postsecret.com chat room are so compassionate—and so practical—that they had me stifling sobs.

      PostSecret seems to have helped a lot of suicidal folks.

      But PostSecret: The Show offers diminishing returns. The idea that we’re not alone simply repeats, and because the central format is as short as a tweet, the notion never acquires satisfying depth.

      After a while, I became wary of potential inauthenticity. We hear about a young woman who comes to the microphone at a Warren event, for instance, confesses to loneliness, and is supposedly amazed by the support she subsequently receives. Feels wanky. An early post that appears on-screen says, “I think it’s funny to put feminine hygiene products in men’s shopping carts.” When we hear about others who followed up with supposed confessions about putting flavoured condoms in seniors’ shopping carts and so on, it feels like they might just be writing material.

      There’s some lovely stuff here, and the performers—Kahlil Ashanti, Ming Hudson, and Nicolle Nattrass—are charming, but I’m not sure that PostSecret belongs in the theatre, which is a place where you invest time and expect accumulation.

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