notjustaboutsex

performance by Lin Shaye

We need narratives and we need to tell our own stories as both lessons for others and feedback for ourselves. By putting these stories out publicly, it offers us a chance to reflect on events, re live them and also re-invent them if need be.

I have no idea how much of Tripping on Life, written and performed by Lin Shaye, was historically accurate, but her emotional landscape was certainly authentic. Lin, a character actress with an iconic status from character Elise as part of the Insidious franchise. is also sister of famed film producer Robert Shaye and was in Nightmare in Elm Street. In Tripping On Life, Lin takes us back to her hippie youth in a one woman acted out screenplay reading. Lin is a good actor and creates a very visual world of drug addled friends and roommates along with the breathtaking optimism that was promised on the Pacific Coast Highway trail of the late Sixties.

Her shaggy beau and later husband Marshall, may have been her one true love…we don’t know from the history that she shares, but he certainly was part of her learning about love and growing up. She tells the story in passages; honeymoon first, then pre marriage and her father’s disappointment of her life with pot smokers; San Francisco domesticity and then, the… well, won’t give it away.

I don’t know if she is hoping to expand this script into a feature story. Certainly, her depiction of her friends is vivid enough to create a colorful world, and there must be many more stories she could include.

Lin has a wonderful speaking delivery though I winced occasionally at her shriekiness only to learn towards the end of the play that she had won a coveted role in her college’s Bye Bye Birdie production for that talent alone.

Directed Robert Galinsky does a great job in creating a sense of a full show from this staged reading. Joshua Light Show and Marian Saunders help provide psychedelic ambience and the music is very good at putting us in the summer of ’68 with Lin.

The play reminded me of a scene in my friend the late Mack Gilbert’s film, Run Melissa Run, where a stoned couple are preparing for Thanksgiving and there’s a baby and there’s an oven.  That was an urban sixties myth drug tale…Tripping on Life is a sixties love story seen through the smoke.