National Nostalgia

“Those who comply will be considered.” That’s the telling statement expressed by the “moderator” (played by Paul Niebanck) in LINES, the debut play by Bellamy Brewster and Ewan Lloyd, currently in the middle of its run at Theatre 154. This particular line quietly introduces and closes the play within two monologues, but also serves as the crux of the narrative: how does institutional pressure compress and shape our personal identities?

Brewster and Lloyd sought to tackle that question with a setting that felt literal and inescapable to them both: the audition. LINES begins with Isaac—played by Lloyd himself—entering a holding room where actors wait for an audition. It’s neither clear what they’re auditioning for nor when they even begin their audition, but the holding room serves as a state of limbo, tightening their desire against their innate personalities, creating knots of tension that slowly come to a head. It’s a minimal setting that allows the characters to shine before a dark surrealism shrouds the stage, as the uncanny world of the holding room forces its hand on the unsuspecting actors. 

“We pitched each other the same idea, almost like outsiders looking in on the industry… while still being a part of the industry, in a weird way,” Brewster says, describing his initial conversation with Lloyd that wound up as a script. Though both creators had divergent experiences in the artistic field—Brewster as a director and photographer, and Lloyd as an actor—they felt a shared sense of unmasking as they discussed their experiences. Both strive for lofty goals, but also had the deeply resonant experience of putting on a persona to succeed within their field, and felt a sense of disconnect with their true artistry when presented with the pressures of institutional conformity. 

“There were two things I really wanted to explore with this,” Lloyd explains. “The first was how individuals interact with institutions, and how those institutions strip us of agency, and force us to compete and create artificial divisions, and operate as sort of a machine that chews us up. The other half that I wanted to talk about was performance as identity, and how everybody is constantly performing, right?” As an actor, Lloyd was hyper-conscious of performance, but would recognize it as much in day-to-day society as he would in the industry. Both he and Brewster believe that even when a person is alone, they still have a tendency to perform for themselves, acting out a version of themselves that aligns with their aspiration. “Society is just semiotics; it's like a series of signs and signifiers,” Lloyd elaborates. “Identity is performance. 
And we came to the conclusion together that actors, in an audition, would be a great avenue to explore both of those things.” 

Brewster intrinsically understood this as well; as the visual director for Usher for years coinciding with the musician’s Las Vegas residency, Brewster dedicated his life to a singular vision, working on photography, music videos, and an album cover for the R&B legend. He spent the better part of three years living in a hotel room in Vegas rather than his apartment in NYC, where he would return sporadically to access another version of himself. “Going deeper, truly, it's about what it costs to perform,” he says tellingly, acknowledging the subtle performance required for any job and what that entails for your personal identity. “Like, what does it cost for you to do what you love to do? What do you sacrifice?”  

To explore these feelings, the duo began devouring plays as they wrote their own, consuming new and old works by the likes of Wallace Shawn and Tom Stoppard, as well as diving into classic literature and drama as depicted in later scenes of the play. The characters of LINES always stemmed from archetypes, but as Brewster and Lloyd consumed these dramas they noticed how true to life each character felt; as they developed LINES they began to find the core motivation in each character rather than reducing them to simple caricatures. “There's a consistent narrative piece, but you could follow, you could pick one character and only pay attention to them the whole time and never feel like they were turning off or they were just in the background doing nothing,” Lloyd describes. “We wanted to have like a web of arcs that go up and down and intersect that together.”

As the characters in LINES enter the holding room and begin to interact with each other and the ominous moderator, they begin to grapple with themselves—and each other. One by one, personalities clash and characters test the limits of their commitment to the system that is the entertainment industry, which serves as a metaphorical proxy to the institutions that drive any artistic pursuit. Lloyd was particularly keen on exploring the structure this enforces within our social systems, upending humanistic nature in favor of adherence to said structure. “Institutional critique is a big consistency in all my works. The way [institutions] tear us down, not just as people and the unique ways in which we crack, or the ways we try to survive, but also the collective ways in which we engage with these institutions. And the way these institutions are designed to break that up, this essential camaraderie that exists between all people.” 

The play stops short of providing relief from this despondency, choosing instead to push the characters far enough to materialize their identity. Still, there’s a moral to this story: this is not a world in which you can win alone. “
This beautiful and essential nature we have, that this machine has developed specific tools to tear at and to force us to confront it alone which ultimately, from my perspective, is unwinnable,” Lloyd says. “You can't fight these things alone. 
You can't, it will always win. The machine will always win if you attack it by yourself. You have to fight that incentive to divide and to turn on your brothers and sisters.” 

The politics of institutional pressure is so pervasive across modern society that the emotions in LINES are instantly palpable. It guides the audience through the tempers that come with forcing fragile personas during what feels like a high-stakes, zero-sum era. In the midst of this moment when independence always feels slightly out of reach, at what point do we truly become ourselves? “Every time I express myself, I feel like a gas valve loosening,” Lloyd says. “But I also feel like, like, the work never really ends. I'm gonna keep talking about some of this stuff, because I've talked about it and I've expressed it and that feels good, but like…the thing is still there.” The characters of LINES may not offer a salve, but their creators see the act of creation itself as the way to challenge the implacable assault by institutions that press down on individuals. “I had a knot today that still hasn't been unraveled,” Brewster confessed shortly after a performance of LINES. “And, it makes me feel like it's cyclical. 
After this project is done, I'm gonna go through this again. I'm going to go through the fire for another project, and it doesn't end.”