Bryan Anderson, LeAnne Howe response

I have been to the theatre a few dozen times so far in my life. Every time I have gone, I have seen one of three types of performances: a play, a musical, or a concert of sorts. I therefore was quite unsure what to expect from LeAnne Howe's one-woman show "Choctalking." 

Once the show began, I found myself in a sort of "active scan" mode trying to determine what particular part of the performance is the deciding point for me. This strategy, I realize now, really almost defeated the whole purpose of finding a moment. Possibly as a result of this constant scanning, I never really did have a deciding moment during the performance. Partially, though, I feel as though I never got the chance. The entire performance was only about one hour long, half of what I was subconsciously. I feel as though I was holding out for something, expecting it to occur later in the performance. 

I suppose since I did not have a particular deciding moment, I can only reflect on some of the smaller things that jumped out at me. The first thing that I noticed was her "acting attitude." She seemed tired, as though she had told her story so many times that she was almost at a point of questioning it. Whether this particular rhetorical feel was intentional or not, it definitely had an effect in how I perceived the performance. Whether this effect was positive or negative, I am honestly not entirely sure. 

The structure in which she told her various experiences was also something that I am ambivalent about. This stories taken as whole seemed rather interesting, but the constant jumping between them created a type of choas that did not work well for me. I kept having a problem where my mind would wander for a moment only to find that the performer had again changed stories. I noticed that she read from a text, and I feel like if I read the text rather than having seen it performed, the chaos factor would have been decreased. I suppose it also would have helped if I was just able to focus my mind on what was going on, which is obviously a fault of my own. 

I suppose the "best" moment for me was the ending scene when all the emotion was derived from each story and combined into a sigular boisterous culmination. Even this scene though seemed to have an aire of exhaustion similar to the one I mentioned in the beginning. Whether or not this was the attention, again, remains unknown.