Hope, Hello from the Other Side
Love can be found even in the most remote parts of the world, where the mere presence of the other lights up the hope of a better end in the individual, sometimes even through manipulation. And hand on heart, in moments of the cruellest pain, one is willing to do anything for even the slightest relief, especially for someone else with whom to share one's pain in the fog of injustice.
Just as the Latvian Academy of Culture’s production of Hello Out There! begins with a greeting into the darkness of the ether, so too does it end with one. The audience forms a kind of magnetic field around a pair of outcasts, whose misunderstanding or fear of the outside world binds them together, body and soul, in a Texas prison, maximally turned away from God, or perhaps in contact with the absolute.
The performers work with the empty space of the stage, where the dominant feature is a rope hanging from the ceiling, tethered at all times by the main protagonist’s arm, haunting him at every single step like a ball on his foot, but in that metaphysical form, connected to something up there that judges our actions. As an audience we are all the cooperating with the idea that the main character is trapped, but where are the bars that separate him from the outside world? Isn’t the rope just a prison to him, a universal reference to the sin and guilt we all drag behind us at all times? The same feelings that keep us isolated from society in the bowels of the prison of our interior where only the chosen few have access, imprison us all, often unjustifiably. When Emily rests in Photo-finish’s arms, their touch is not fully intimate; the presence of the rope never leaves them. Rather, they grow accustomed to it and cooperate with it as a commonplace pillar of their relationship or godly existence. Who is on the other side of the rope, however, remains unanswered.
The beginning is the end of this vicious circle of loneliness and longing for understanding or a shoulder to cry on. The death of the alleged rapist at the end of the short play seems to precede the moment of the beginning when we find the protagonist lying under a rope with an unexplained wound on his face. How long will this circle of existence actually repeat itself, and is there a way out of it? How much more painful is the existence of a lonely man when he has felt, even for a small moment, what it is like to belong to someone and somewhere? Then a primordial hello (perhaps purely imaginary?) from the other side is all that remains for the sad person.
