Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Marta Portillo is an Ovation Fellow from Los Angeles City College.

Every audience member who steps into a theatre to watch a performance of a play is going to have a different experience. They will watch the same play. They will watch the same actions and words on stage but each will impose his or her own life experiences on those very same actions and words. My experience with the play As White as O started with a visit to the Road Theatre website. On the site there was a trailer to the play.

When I clicked on the link I found myself looking at what I thought was part of a documentary about outsider art in the US. I left my house thinking I was going to see a play based on the true life experiences of the artists. I had the opportunity to meet with the director Sam Anderson before the play began. He clarified that the trailer was a mock documentary. Then he mentioned the play explored the subject of Synesthesia, a condition where one sense is accompanied by another. For instance, a composer may not only hear the notes of the music he composes but he may see the notes in color or even taste the music.

What? Excuse me? Come again?

At that moment I had to throw out my preconceptions of what I thought I was going to watch and go into the theatre not knowing what to expect. For some reason, thinking I was going to watch something based on a true story anchored me. I made my own assumptions of what I was going to watch based on a trailer. In art whether it is visual or performed, there is an intent to capture some type of truth. Documentaries are unique because the audience is watching, just as the word states, documented reality. Our society is obsessed with reality; something inside us wants to find a human connection, some type of universal truth that resides inside all of us.

Film and television use this need as a marketing tool all the time. I cannot count the number of times I have seen the tag line “based on a true story” or how at the end of these films there is a clip of the real person to remind us this person actually existed. The trailer for As White as O uses these elements and creates a connection between the audience and the play before anyone steps foot in the theatre.

The woman sitting next to my mentor saw the same trailer I did. She mentioned how interesting it would be to have known these people. I left the theatre wondering if my experience would have been different if I had never talked to Sam Anderson and known the documentary was not real. Did this information diminish the value of what I had just seen? Having this information did not impede me from identifying with the play or re-exploring a truth about myself.

At a particular moment in the play, Ed an artist (played by Ramon De Ocampo) explains to Jack a synesthete (TJ Marchbank) that he lives his life the way all artists would like to live; his ability allows him to literally live in a metaphor. He tells him, how at one point he wished he was Jack. For me that moment was one of the most honest in the play because it held true to a way I have felt. I have looked at people who seem to be endowed with more talent than the rest and I have wished to be them, even for a moment. Perhaps with their talent I would have the ability to create something that is unanimously considered wonderful, great and true to its art form.

We live in a world where everything has the capability of being manipulated. The trailer was very specific in its intention; perhaps I would have walked away wanting to know the characters in the play the same way the woman sitting next to my mentor did but what ultimately shaped my opinion was a parallel experience with a specific character. Each event in our lives will be uniquely ours but the emotions underlying the experience are what bring us together. It is there we find truth, even if the experience we witness is fictional.