Beyond the personal story
I’m holding a stubby plastic cup of white wine in my right hand, talking with a professor at a nearby university about my work. She approached me because I had said something in my introduction that caught her attention. “What was it, again?” she wondered aloud. Oh yes, I mentioned my interest in stories.
As someone who works in theatre, I think a lot about stories. It’s not uncommon to hear somebody in my industry refer to themselves as a “storyteller,” and it’s true that a good chunk of being a theatre artist is writing, finding, and sharing narratives (the fancy word for stories) that you hope will be moving to an audience watching them unfold onstage.
So for the record, I am extremely pro-story. Stories connect us, they shape consciousness, and they may even be the very structures forming lasting memories in our brains. However, I am also worried about stories. I am worried that we, as a society, have misplaced our trust and over-invested in an individualistic brand of personal storytelling.
Our culture is steeped in these kinds of stories. They are in our Op-Eds and Facebook posts, on our favorite Netflix specials and podcasts, and they reverberate in our earbuds like a swarm of inspiring, little bees. “How I finally overcame addiction,” or “my unbelievable reunion with my long-lost brother.” Everyone loves a good story. In fact, we love personal stories so much that we consume them like candy.
This was the idea that floated in the air from my conversation partner to me and hovered briefly above my Chardonnay before plopping itself firmly into my consciousness. She teaches engineering students at the university to understand and appreciate writing, and has seen how powerful it is when they find the words to give voice to significant moments from their own lives. But this idea led us into deeper questions about this phenomenon — the “This American Life” effect, story slams, TEDTalks. There’s an assumption that these platforms function as an obvious social good: that they make us somehow more sensitive and empathetic to each other’s basic humanity, that by sharing our individual stories we come to a fuller understanding of what makes each person’s life challenging and unique. I think all of that is possibly true.
But I also wonder what happens when we stop there. When did the personal story become the premiere form of narrative exchange? When these sorts of personal stories function like cultural candy, we can consume them ad nauseam. They are sweet and satisfying, and they ask for very little from their listeners (not to mention their often-contrived nature). The problem with all this is that we never get to anything bigger. My story will always be my story: it can never be our story.
I told my new friend how I like to play with adaptation and translation in my work, mashing up lots of different stories to create something that is emotionally-similar but narratively-distinct from each person’s individual experience. It’s how many devised theatre artists create their work. For me this process is about teasing out the connections between our lives, and finding spaces of overlap and divergence. What would it look like to create something that moves people not by juxtaposing many different personal stories, but through a cohesive, shared narrative that anchors itself in the sum total of our unique perspectives?
I want to argue that this kind of collectivity matters. In order to learn and grow and appreciate each other’s stories, we need something more than one-way transmission. We need a dialogic experience: one in which your story is heard, processed, and reflected back to you with new meaning. Perhaps my response to your story sparks a related one, or leads us together to the creation of a new, shared narrative. That work is harder, it’s spicier. It’s not always so easy to swallow.
My favorite phrase for this idea is “new mythologies,” which I borrow from the playwright Charles Mee (via the writing of director Anne Bogart). New mythologies are the shared cultural narratives that supplant outdated notions of what the world looks like and help us to establish the kind of relationships we want to see moving forward.
In the end, stories are never static, and they shouldn’t be launched recklessly onto media platforms or tiny stages at bars like empathy bath-bombs. They need to be simmered, shared, tasted, and re-seasoned to suit the purposes of the communities they serve. Otherwise, our cultural teeth may start to rot from all the sugar. And I think we owe each other more nourishment than that.
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