Taking Your Broken Heart and Making It into Art
Niki Hatzidis
Carrie Fisher’s famous advice for artists was the first thing that came to mind after seeing Anna Snapp’s one women show I Found the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow at the United Solo Theater Festival. The show is a personal telling of Snapp’s journey through the diagnosis of various health struggles, mental health, and sexual assault, through raw honesty, tenacity, and humor. Snapp addresses the audience directly and walks us through moments of grief, fear, and trauma with expertly crafted wit and courage.
The show has been five years in the making and Anna has been performing it for nearly four years, even overseas at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “Writing and performing my own story felt like the most therapeutic thing I could do for myself as I faced major adversity over the years,” Snapp told me, “It has seen many iterations.” Anna workshopped the script last year at the Lighthouse Writers dramatic writing intensive in Denver. “I ended up making some major edits to enhance the idea of the mind-body connection in the story, and finding the shades of grey in the crises I endured and how I reflected on them.”
The recent performance at the United Solo Theater Festival was directed by movement specialist and devisor Sheila Bandyopadhyay, which was evident by Snapp’s clear and free connection to her body and movement as she plays herself and other characters. “The rehearsal process was eye-opening,” Snapp said of working with Bandyopadhyay, “she really found a way to make the storytelling more clear.” Snapp has great control of her physicality in that we see how heavy and light affects her throughout. There is a clear journey and switch that only comes from mind/body connectivity and resonance.
The play is entirely autobiographical and done with such unencumbered honesty that it made me wonder about Anna’s approach in tackling the story as an actor, and how it differed from any other kind of storytelling. “You’re really putting yourself out there in an incredibly vulnerable way that you don’t always have to do when you’re playing a fictional character,” Snapp explained. “Yes, you tell that character’s story, but you can have some distance from it. In this case, I am reliving the traumas I experienced and am putting it out for the world; no distance whatsoever.” Although you see the struggle of opening up about traumas, the audience also experiences Snapp in almost a euphoric state of being. “It feels liberating and cathartic to release my experiences into the world and have complete ownership over my story.” There is a great sense of release and breath throughout.
In reliving these traumas, a story of this nature means you are sharing these traumas, sometimes all over again or for the first time, with people you know and love. “Over the years, many people in my life have seen the show and have been pretty blown away and shocked about how much they didn’t know was going on behind closed doors,” Snapp says. “Because of the absolute support and love they’ve shown me over the years in the journey of this show, most of it wasn’t too hard to perform in front of them,” Snapp continued. “There are only a few moments in the show where I feel a bit uneasy sharing the information, but do it anyway because I know it’s a necessary component of my story and the show.”
The play is taking place while Anna is backstage preparing to walk on stage for a performance. She weaves in and out of memory and telling her story, to going through the motions of an actor preparing for a role. I asked Snapp why it was important for her to use that framework for the structure of the play. “I wanted the audience to understand that while I was going through these medical mishaps, I was still pursuing acting, a profession that requires extreme emotional, mental, and physical endurance, which is even harder to accomplish while you’re sick,” Anna told me. “The idea that at the end of the sixty minutes until places, I could either decide to perform and face my struggles or let them take over me creates for the audience the major stakes at play.” The mechanism was affective as a “back to one” feature, giving the audience a respite from some of the more intense emotional moments. As an audience member, I appreciated the breath, and actors would find the ritual familiar and resonant.
The crux of the story is Anna’s experiences with Crohns disease and depression, depicted partially through her interactions with medical professionals. How doctors bedside manner in treating patients is an ongoing problem in the profession and Anna depicts those interactions and maltreatments in a very clear heartfelt light. Other times, the audience is thrust suddenly into the very depths of Anna’s traumas of suicide attempts and her sexual assault. We are thrown in just as she would have been, and somewhere in the well of agony and injury, Anna gives us moments to laugh with spurts of comedy such as an open love letter to the floor and the recreation of a faux pharmaceutical commercial.
The medium of a solo show is so unique, and the process that an actor undergoes to perform such a show is so different from a collaborative ensemble play, that I wanted to know if Anna might have any advice. “To anyone undertaking the writing and performance of a solo show, I would highly encourage them to take risks, be open, find the humor in the darkness, and always be open to changes and edits. Because it is so internal working on a piece alone, there were parts of the process where I got so stuck in my own material that I forgot that I needed another set of eyes to tell me what possible changes I could make.” When I asked what advice she has for processes of self-care when undertaking something of this caliber, she said, “I really have to do a thorough physical, vocal, and mental warm-up. Before last night’s show, I
full-on gave myself a pep talk, telling myself that I could do it, that it’s my unique story and only I can tell it, and that I am capable, ready, and brave. Sometimes you need to build yourself up before doing something so raw and vulnerable for others.”
“My goal with this show was to make a connection with at least one audience member, for someone to leave saying, ‘Wow, I went through that too,’” Snapp told me when explaining her ideal impact for telling her story. “I want people to feel comfortable sharing their stories and know they aren’t alone,” Snapp continued, “for so many years while I was sick, I felt isolated from the world—little did I know so many people around me have experienced the same things.” And for her hopes in continuing to perform I Found the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow, Anna said, “with my show, I also want to start to increase mental health awareness and ending the stigma surrounding mental illness. It’s much easier in our society to say, ‘I need my insulin for my Diabetes’ than to say, ‘I need to take my anti-depressants right now.’ Both are crucial to survival and yet there is judgment surrounding the latter.”
The word brave seems somewhat cliche and at the same time insufficient to describe Anna’s raw telling of this tumultuous time in her life. All in all, it is an honest example of how we all go through some difficult and tiring experiences that shape us into who stands before an audience of our peers. With the fortune that we have the support of those who love us, we come out of it on the other side to stand in the sunshine.
Niki Hatzidis is an actor and award-nominated playwright based in NYC. NikiHatzidis.com.