"Love Hurts" So Good

Ever wonder how to connect in Fairfield County? I’m not talking about expanding your twitter followers or keeping up to date with your 1,537 Facebook friends’ newsfeeds (though, truly, I’m impressed—I have no idea how you find the time).

But, no. I’m talking about connecting as in sharing a moment, in real time, with live-action humans.

On Thursday evening, MouseMuse Productions—which brings live, spoken word events to community venues—once again showed how it’s done. Their “Love Hurts” program, the last of their winter season at the Fairfield Museum and History Center (FMHC), brought nine storytellers (seven on the program and two spontaneous volunteers from the audience) under the lights to, as promised, bare their souls to the sold out audience.

Here’s the thing about soul-baring in public: it can get awkward real quick. Think Rex Ryan’s post-season exit interview. Or the Kardashians. (I swear I’ve never seen their show, but I watched a clip on usmagazine.com once when I was procrastinating.)

For public soul-baring to function as entertainment, it requires proportion, perspective, scale, and not taking one’s self too seriously (which is maybe the surest way to create an awkward moment). But when performers hit the mark, it opens up a sublime moment of connection between them and the audience, where they see each other—or who each would like to be—in each other.

It’s this delicate balance that MouseMuse’s storytellers maintain so well. With the theme being “love hurts,” the audience could probably guess that the content would be raw and intimate. Which it was—affairs were admitted to, a diabetes diagnosis was revealed, a domestic violence charge was disclosed. Yet the storytellers managed to keep the audience empathetically engaged, laughing one moment and holding their collective breath the next.

The give and take between speaker and audience was positively electric. Enhancing this dynamic interplay is that MouseMuse’s storytellers don’t memorize their stories. Instead, they ride a narrow line between spontaneity and preparation, like football players who practice a scripted play under ideal conditions but then are forced to adjust when playing in real time. They practice telling their stories with Story Master Bill Bosch, but they don’t quite know what will happen when they’re standing in front of a live audience that’s laughing or gasping. And everyone can feel it.

The setting also amplified the speaker-audience interaction—FMHC is situated on the historic Town Green in Fairfield, parts of which became Redding, Weston, Bridgeport, and Westport.

“The Fairfield Museum is not a museum of the Town of Fairfield,” said MouseMuse Productions founder Ina Chadwick, of Westport. “It’s a museum of Fairfield County.”

Fittingly, the evening’s storytellers represented Norwalk (Arch Currie and Max Westhelle), Westport (Maureen Hallock, Pete Pastorelli, and Shannon Walsh), Bridgeport (Jeep Halo), and Fairfield (Thomas Lawler).

Of the emotional joyride that is a MouseMuse production, Eliot Snaith, whose manfriend told the story of juggling two girlfriends* at once, said, “What’s amazing is that this doesn’t happen all the time. It’s about the same price as a movie but way better and a more social environment.”

This winter season may be over, but MouseMuse Productions will be back with more. Don’t miss the moment.

*Seriously. Can you imagine telling this story with your current girlfriend in the audience? I thought that was pretty gutsy.