November 10, 2022
By Avery Saad
“A piano is made up of 88 keys.” is how the 60 minute, one-woman show began. Anoushka Lucas stared out into the audience–a very intimate, sixty person audience–and hit one key on the piano. Just like the note just played, her voice reverberated off of the walls and filled the space completely.
The Guardian’s Anya Ryan says that, “Lucas is a writer and actor of rare magnetism” and I couldn’t agree more. She draws the audience in with intense eye contact and hypnotic singing. The raw emotion and vulnerability provided by Lucas is inspiring; Lucas is an extremely brave performer. She has written down her story and performed it in front of multiple audiences. The singer and Oklahoma star melded herself, with fiction, to create an autobiographical(ish) story, with beautiful music to express pain and suffering.
Lilah, Lucas’s character within the show, is recounting moments of her childhood in the mid-to-late nineties, and moments of her adulthood in the mid-to-late 2010’s. She addresses the microaggressions she faced from her school mates, her (now ex) boyfriend's family, and even her (ex) boyfriend himself. She details the struggles of being a woman of color, a woman in music, and a woman of color in music.
The intimacy of the space is one that is definitely required; the space fits the show almost perfectly. Director Jess Edwards use of the space is dynamic, considering the layout is that of a stage, with a piano and a wall. Lucas gets right up into the audience's space, climbs the piano, slowly claws her way up the steps of the bleachers where the audience is sitting. This show is meant to be intimate; it’s meant to get personal.
The wall behind Lucas had three very distinct sections to it: a brick wall, a doorway with faded wallpaper, and giant glass windows. All three sections combined to make one wall, except the tops of each section triangulated, giving a hint of a recording studio. There is a melding of the two ‘pasts’ of the play, and the current moments (when Lucas is directly speaking with the audience). The melding of the past and the present was creating an interesting dynamic, especially since a large portion of the show was Lucas describing the parts of her life that have shaped her–The set mimicked that.
Elephant is a show about racism. It’s about racism, British imperialism, sexism, classism, and colonialism. The intimacy of the space allows Anoushka Lucas to be very clear about these things. But why this story? Why the piano? Why now? I promise you, Anoushka Lucas will address all of your questions and the elephant in the room
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