“But it feels so…Present?
Of course it does. After all, you are having this memory in the present.
If it were happening in the past it wouldn’t
be a memory yet, would it?”
What is it about stories that draw our attention so quickly? Why do they speak to us? Think about the last book you read, the last movie you saw, the last song you listened to. Why did it leave an impact on you?
Is it because we have personally been a servant girl with a fairy godmother and fallen in love with a handsome prince, or because we ourselves have traveled into a magical world after defeating a wicked witch? Of course not, but we can understand what those characters have been through because of what we have been through in our own lives.
Stories connect us to situations we have not experienced by sparking a feeling or memory deep within us to prepare us for what awaits us in the future. The storytellers in “Failure: A Love Story”engage us with visual and audible details that make the show personal and universal to us all in order to teach us a lesson.
“Failure” endeavors to tell us a story rooted in time, time on our side, time on our hands, time. It challenges us to think about time in different ways than we have before. Time is measured, it ticks by on the clocks on the walls, it organizes itself within music. Time turns with the steps we take to reach our goals. However, when our internal clocks stop, what happens to the rest of time?
As characters in the story of the water, the Fail sisters and Mortimer Mortimer learn about the infinite nature of time as well. While time is incremented, it flows through our lives like the river flows through Chicago. Time streams around the bends as the Era of Wonderful Nonsense changes and advances. Most importantly, time rushes and rolls into the future which Mortimer Mortimer is so eager, yet ill-prepared to begin when he first enters Fail Clock Works Est. 1900: Open.
Stories distract us from the real world, inspire our dreams, express beauty and create meaning out of the confusing things we encounter in our lives. They build a bridge between what feels foreign and what we already know to be true. Maybe we have not swam across Lake Michigan or agreed to marry a man we just met, but we comprehend searching for the light of life in the darkness of death. We may not have taken over our father’s clock shop to take care of our loved ones at age 10, but I am sure we have all experienced the kind of unconditional, sacrificial love shared in “Failure.” Though we may not have lived in 1920s Chicago or met talking clocks, our imaginations team up with the characters we meet in the story to pause our own lives for a few hours and help us envision a world where these imaginary things are undoubtedly possible.
- Anna Leigh Convery, Dramaturg
