The temptation to time travel during the past year has been strong. What if we could just go “Back to Before,” as the song from Ragtime puts it?
The degree to which audiences engage with the performers is up to the nature of the various pieces and to the individual audience members. You can certainly keep your camera off if you’d rather be in your pajamas (as opposed to looking like the cat’s pajamas), but it’s fun to cast your peepers at the other Zoom participants and the period costumes some have donned for the occasion.
Lee’s segment also includes a story about American author Bret Harte, whose attempts to satirize anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California in the poem “The Heathen Chinee” (in which a Chinese man playing cards is revealed to be cheating, but only after one of the white men at the table has also been unmasked as a cheat) backfired. The subtlety of the point Harte was trying to make—white people’s misdeeds belong to themselves, whereas they’ll blame an entire race for what one person of color might do—got lost in the anti-Asian prejudices of the era (which of course are sadly still too present). Harte later called it “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.”
If you suffer from FOMO, then it’s worth planning more than one trip yourself with this show. Daniel Rashid says, “There are a lot of clues in the hallways of where certain rooms are. If you click on posters and things like that in the hallway, you’ll be able to find out where to find a certain kind of experience. And if you find you’re enjoying a room, I’d suggest staying there as long as you can.”
Open run: Fri 9 PM CDT (no show Fri 4/2), intothemist.net, $18.
