A little advice shrinks problems, loneliness
Your problem is specific to you. No one has ever suffered it in your particular hues, with your particular contours. It reflects a singular life, a singular set of circumstances.
But your problem is also universal. Everyone else knows exactly how you feel. Write your grief, rage, loneliness, lust, fear or confusion, perhaps in a letter, and you describe not just your life but what it is to be alive.
We read advice columns in part because they build a bridge from human to humanity, because they assure us that we are not alone in not knowing what to do with a great wallop of feeling. The Bay Area premiere of “Tiny Beautiful Things” lifts a hand out to you, that you, too, might walk that bridge.
Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) adapted the play from Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name, which compiles the gorgeous online advice columns Strayed wrote as “Dear Sugar.” I saw San Francisco Playhouse’s production, directed by Bill English,
Sunday, Feb. 2.
We read most advice columns because they promise some higher disembodied authority, one without the myopia or bias of our family and friends. They offer someone who can finally tell us what to do — or at least offer a yardstick against which to measure what we were going to do anyway, advised or not. “Dear Sugar” offered still more. It affected no faux objectivity, instead answering stories with stories, life experience with life experience.
In “Tiny Beautiful Things” Letter Writer #3 (Jomar Tagatac) might write in asking, “When do I have to take that big step and say, ‘I love you’?” to a girlfriend, and Sugar (Susi Damilano) might write back with the tale of her mother’s last word to her, weaving the disparate tales together thanks to the power of open arms and a wide, long view.
More often, she doesn’t have to reach very far. You’ve committed a crime? So has she, one just like yours. Feeling weak, stuck, unable to forgive? She’s been there, too, and the advice she wrings from her life is as affirmative and wise as therapy, but more pithily and saucily expressed: “You cannot convince people to love you.” “Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” And to a father mourning a dead son: “Your son hasn’t yet taught you everything he has to teach you.”
Damilano as Sugar must absorb all the letter writers’ traumas. She has to feel in her core each person’s struggle, wrestle with how impossible each situation is. Then she has to dig into herself and claw her way back out, baring her own shames so she has something to offer. Over and over, Damilano not only performs the full, herculean feat of true empathy but also wrangles a narrative out of it, with a range of emotional peaks and valleys. It’s like a strength test, but for feeling, one she conquers with athleticism and grace.
Tagatac, Mark Anderson Phillips and Kina Kantor make playgrounds of the assembly of letterwriting characters they each play. One finds a prim modesty for one physicality, then a bro’s sloppiness for the next. Another exudes selfassured mischief, then a quieter form of assurance, an assurance that doesn’t need anyone else to know it’s assured.
Yet there can be too much assurance in “Tiny Beautiful
Things.”
Although Sugar says she’s made mistakes in the past, heroin use among them, she comes across in the play as fully formed, with nary a problem to work through, a flaw or desire to endure. Omniscience works great for an advice columnist, but it works less well for a play character. For someone to earn our attention on stage, they must show that they need to speak to us, that nothing else will do. Sugar seems to write advice columns for the same reason she keeps opening the fridge to pour more white wine: because it makes life more fun.
Still other problems dog the script. Sometimes it can sound selfserving, as when one writer asks Sugar, “Where did you get that big heart of yours?” And it never varies the Q&A format, which might have helped give Sugar more depth. (What’s her life like outside of writing columns?) Even with a short run time of under 90 minutes, the structure rapidly becomes predictable, even as English finds ways to vary the mood, making some exchanges dishy, others delicate, others raw.
But if an advice column works best as a column, not as a play, there’s still something to be gained by taking in Strayed’s words together. Jacquelyn Scott’s striking set uses gleaming metal poles to suggest a leafless forest, which Michael Oesch’s lighting design makes forbidding, then surreal, then gloomy, then teeming with life and possibility. Often it looks lonely up there.
Seeing a play, like reading an advice column, turns out to be a great reminder that we’re not so alone after all.