Review: Shana Carroll "The Attic" at Goodman Theatre

“I fell once,” says the circus artist Shana Carroll at the top of her wondrous stunner of a new show, “The Attic: Things I’ve Seen While Lying On My Back.”

That would be from a trapeze.

Lying on the floor of a tent, and then on her bed, Carroll’s mind spiraled through myriad images and ideas, racing back to her childhood bedroom and her decision to run away to the circus and then forward to new realms of creativity and personal manifestations: love, for example; childbirth, even her own inevitable death.

That, really, is the organizing principle for Carroll’s new show, the world premiere, season-opener at the Goodman Theatre, but also the beginning of a major international tour for Carroll’s physical theater company, The 7 Fingers. This show is, to my mind, also a no-brainer for Broadway.

I should stipulate that I am both a circus geek and a longtime Carroll fan. To my mind, she has done more than any other single artist to elevate circus artists as individual people with hopes and fears, good days and bad, childhoods and pregnancies, skills and doubts.

She understands, better than anyone I’ve ever watched, the capacity of circus skills to articulate an emotional subtext and to make an audience feel happiness and sorrow.

She is a de-constructor of mega-brands like the Cirque du Soleil, her former employer and the source for many of her collaborators, entertainment behemoths with extraordinary constituent artistry, but that reduce performers to figures within an ephemeral concept, ruled by a god-like director. (It is no coincidence that Cirque describes its rehearsal process as “creation.” Carroll’s thesis here is that those therein are created upon.)

All of that said, though, and despite what the metaphor of falling might suggest, “The Attic” is also a joyous and warm-centered show. The Goodman stage bursts with an international company of 11 circus artists, specialists in silks, trapeze, acrobatics, juggling, stilt-walking and more. This extraordinary ensemble (and I do not use that adjective lightly here) both act out Carroll’s inner life and emerge as pulsing individuals themselves. There is gentle audience interaction, too.

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Carroll honors and loves the traditions of her art form even as she works for change. And that’s why “The Attic” will blow you away: Carroll’s technical circus standards are extraordinarily high (and I have seen a lot of circus in my life) but she can pull them off because leading circus artists want to work with her in an environment that celebrates them as living, breathing, speaking individuals. You cannot critique some of the historical and present-day mores of how circus is conceived without also being able to replicate, or exceed, that with which you have an issue. And that is why “The Attic” is so good. It knows that. It shows us that.

One particular sequence here, re-creating the Cirque du Soleil’s early shows (every last one of which I loved) both celebrates what they achieved and peels away the dehumanizing aspects at the same time. They problematize, as an academic might say, but they also note the beauty, the brilliance and the innovation. So few progressive artists understand this truth of art. But Carroll does. So does the soundscape from composer Colin Gagné, a gorgeous score that celebrates how music enhances how bodies move through space for your entertainment and questions how it lulls you into not seeing what you should.

Carroll is also a gifted choreographer, and fans of contemporary dance will be delighted with what they see here as she uses circus bodies, including her own, to explore matters of the heart, keying into early memory, teenage angst, pending motherhood, the future of humans. At one point, she explores the question of what circus artists feel more than anything else when they are up there at the top of some tent in, say, Mexico City, hanging on for dear life, not knowing where they are in the world but nonetheless in touch with their own bodies and minds by necessity.

Her answer? Yearning.

I cannot get that out of my head, realizing anew that yearning is really the default position of most every performer in every circus-driven show I’ve seen over the decades. Yearning for a connection. Yearning for success on the high wire. Yearning for the audience’s applause. The central question of “The Attic,” I think, is whether that yearning is organic and healthy or whether it has been imposed from the outside and puts your soul at risk. More simply, it’s whether yearning eight or more times a week when you go to work is a good way to live your life.

The answer to that question is complicated and, well, everything Carroll does is complicated, and her embrace thereof is her artistic secret sauce. I cannot overstate how extraordinarily well the Goodman production team, working with 7 Fingers and the designers Ana Cappelluto, Marie Chantale  Vaillancourt, Alexander Nichols and Johnny Ranger, has rigged and executed this show, which felt technically flawless on Tuesday night, even though it has just started.

Do you need to care about the circus to appreciate “The Attic”? I suppose it helps, but no, you don’t. It’s a show about when to embrace a whole and when to leave. It struck me as a piece with a lot to say to anyone wondering whether to leave a job, or to retire, or to move in a whole new direction. And to anyone facing a health crisis and loving someone who must.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic

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Review: “The Attic: Things I’ve Seen While Lying On My Back” (4 stars)

When: Through Oct. 4

Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.

Running time: 2 hours

Tickets: $34-$139 at 312-443-3800 and goodmantheatre.org/attic

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