By Jane Miller and Brian Quirt. A Nightswimming Theatre production, presented as part of Boca del Lupo’s Micro Performance Series. At the Fishbowl on Granville Island on Wednesday, June 7. Continues until June 10

We’ve all got at least one: a song we turn to when we want a good cry. These Are the Songs That I Sing When I’m Sad resembles an informal seminar with a very likable instructor explaining why these songs affect us the way they do.

Performer Jane Miller created this piece with Nightswimming’s Brian Quirt. The pair read up on discoveries made by researchers in the past couple of decades on music’s psychological, physiological, and neurological effects. They also polled friends about their favourite sombre tunes.

Earlier productions of this play have been done in private homes, and the Fishbowl gets close to that intimacy, with the small audience seated in a circle around Miller’s keyboard. She opens with Adele’s “Someone Like You”, a number so demonstrably sob-inducing that it’s been the subject of both an SNL sketch and a Wall Street Journal article. Emotionally intense songs, it turns out, share some distinctive characteristics: melodic tension and release, spacious arrangements, and sudden shifts from soft to loud. These qualities give us goosebumps, make our hearts race, and flood our brains with dopamine, the feel-good hormone.

Miller’s presentation of this information is so casual that it never feels like a lecture; it’s more like good dinner-party conversation. She encourages the audience to share their favourite sad songs, and there’s an uncensored quality to the group’s reactions—which include a good deal of laughter—to her stories.

Miller shares a lot of herself, too, from personal accounts of loss and grief to her impressive beatboxing and a cappella singing skills. But while I was thoroughly engaged throughout, I found myself spending more time contemplating the idea of goosebump-inducing music than actually feeling the goosebumps.

Still, I’m glad I saw this show, and I look forward to checking out the playlists that the artists will be compiling based on audience suggestions at each performance. (You can find them at sadsongs.ca/.) These Are the Songs That I Sing When I’m Sad leaves you with plenty to reflect on, as well as an urge to dig through your music collection and luxuriate in its moodiest moments.