A Scenic View by Ken Rus Schmoll

I reread Crystal Finn’s Find Me Here recently and kept thinking of Wittgenstein’s statement, “The world is all that is the case.” What is all that is the case? What is the world? What is really there? The play poses that question analytically, emotionally, and also literally. And also satisfyingly.

When I first read the play, I said to her in an email that it was “meaty and full and somehow, too, light and translucent, a web of relationships that have clear history and longevity but also spontaneity teetering on the unknown of whatever might happen next in life.” It reminded me of the films Summer Hours and The Man of My Life. It made me ache with longing and burst out laughing. I also remember it felt like inhaling fresh air.

The word “flawed,” when attributed to a person, is redundant. Find Me Here describes the discord between members of four generations of a family, and yet remarkably each character is deeply good. The dramatic heft of the play lies, I think, in its belief that we can all agree and disagree simultaneously. Or maybe that agreeing can only exist on a bed of disagreeing. The cost of agreement is letting go.

Each character’s world view could be described as unique and even remote from the others. But each one is also in process. The failed and successful attempts to cast out and connect are the fabric of the play. We get to experience the close pleasures of personality and eccentricity, and simultaneously the scenic view of circumstance, of humor, of how people organize themselves or are organized in (and into) a family.

I’m describing life. And Chekhov, which the play acknowledges and enjoys.

But the other thing I wrote to Crystal was that I felt “an instantaneous recognition and inspiration of what the play wants to be on a stage.” Unlike life, the theater has extra dimensions, ones that only exist on a stage, “the theatrical,” which is a term that has actually only ever meant the exigencies of acting, the burden of actors to manifest the impossible. The complex terrain of Find Me Here, while woven, wrought, decorated, and littered with the stuff of life, is fueled by the impossible. It opens up in my mind like a pop-up book, reaching toward regions beyond the horizon and periphery, unknowable until now, here, at the Wild Project.

Ken Rus Schmoll, Crystal Finn on Zoom, December 2020, MacBook Air screenshot, private collection.