Lie Low by Solas Nua at Atlas by Audrey Brown

Lie Low by Solas Nua (Instagram)

November 8th at 7:30 pm

Now Playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Click Here For Tickets!

Written by Audrey Brown for DITD

“We’ll choreograph it: like a dance.” Lie Low, a new Irish play now in its North American debut, is not a dance show. But it starts and ends with dance, and it is arguably threaded through with a narrative about dance; the very choreography of making it through life and healing through trauma.

Written by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth and debuted at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2022, Lie Low makes its overseas debut on a Washington, D.C. stage, supported by Solas Nua, an organization dedicated to uplifting modern Irish voices in the nation’s capital. Solas Nua is a resident arts partner at Washington’s Atlas Performing Arts Center, where Lie Low is playing for the next three weeks.

The piece features just two actors: Megan Graves as Faye, a woman who promises to both her offstage therapist and her brother that she is fine following last year’s home break-in and sexual trauma; and Cody Nickell as her brother Naoise, who pays Faye a visit to check in on her after not having spoken for the year since the break-in…and asks her for an unexpected favor. Before we see Nickell’s face, though, we are introduced to a silent Faye and a dancing “Duckman”—literally, a man in a suit with a rubber duck mask, as he emerges from Faye’s wardrobe and sweeps her up in a frenzied swing duet. Here, stuck in one of Faye’s nightmares, is where the play begins, and where the dancing kicks off. 

I spoke to choreographer Robert Bowen Smith ahead of the performance, and he was adamant about the fact that Lie Low is neither a musical nor a dance piece, but rather “a play with dance,” one where there are “three proper dance pieces and…one other movement piece that isn’t a dance piece” – a “stylized, heightened movement moment,” choreographed in tandem with director Rex Daugherty and intimacy coordinator Lorraine Ressegger-Slone. The swing pieces that bookend the play are “straight from the script,” and the dance that takes place midway through the show is written to “be kind of a matador and bull thing, so I turned it into a paso doble. She didn’t say paso doble, but to me, if you’ve got two people dancing and it reflects the bull-matador relationship, it should be a paso doble.” 

The opening dance, written by Smith, is a classic swing dance to the untrained eye, set to one of the most recognizable swing songs—Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” However, with the emergence of the duck-masked man, the normalcy of the dance is already thrown into question, and when he begins to raise Faye quite roughly into a series of lifts and tosses, her once-accepting eyes beginning to bulge in fear, the dance becomes increasingly derailed, teetering on the edge of uncomfortable. “I wanted the dance numbers to mirror the moments of violence in some way, so that there was continuity through the entire piece,” said Smith. He admitted that some of the shapes in both his swing pieces and the later paso doble are not typical of their respective styles: “someone not familiar with dance could watch it and maybe not pick up on them,” but in reality, the movements are less married to their corresponding styles and more “reflective of some of the violence you see within the piece.” 

We learn after the opening duet that Faye has been “having nightmares”—she promises they have nothing to do with her sexual trauma and insists it is buried in the past, but soon reveals that many of them have to do with assumedly related concepts, such as being chased by disembodied male organs or being seduced by headless men in masks (her year-ago attacker was seen only from below, and ran off before she had the chance to see his face, so she has read a duck mask onto him in the following months). Appearing alone onstage in a single spotlight, her conversation with the voiced-only therapist character has the air of a television interview from the Ed Sullivan era: throughout the conversation, Faye wears a hyperbolic, plastered-on smile in response to a series of patronizing questions that are less attempts at diagnosing or healing trauma and more unsubstantial getting-to-know-you interrogations. The lighting here is stark: a sharp spotlight casts Faye as the only person visible in the space, making the glow-stick-like interior of the wardrobe all the more jarring when the rest of the stage is illuminated. And the set is simplistic: Naoise comments on the emptiness of his sister’s home, offering to bring her a couch, which she declines. The lack of movable parts on stage allows the focus to remain on the jarringly large wardrobe, which plays its own character and houses its own stories as the piece goes on. 

While not a musical, both dance and music play a major role in Lie Low. Ahead of the opening swing duet, a disembodied force queues up “Sing, Sing, Sing,” despite Faye’s attempts to silence the music. When her brother arrives at her flat and Faye discloses to him that she’s done research in exposure therapy and thinks that he, a man who she trusts, could help her reposition her fear of strange men hiding in her home, a major component of the “choreography” that Faye sets for Naoise has to do with music and dance. She instructs him to get in her wardrobe, listen for the start of the song on her record player, wait for a designated number of seconds, then step into the room, clad in the duck mask she keeps hanging inside the wardrobe. As Naoise begrudgingly agrees to her demands and closes the oversized wardrobe’s doors, we see Faye alone again onstage, setting the scene to replicate the circumstances of the break-in a year ago. She moves the needle on her record player to play a pop vocal song, steps behind the wardrobe to gingerly remove her underwear, then picks up a floor mop, using it interchangeably as a microphone to lip-sync into and as a dance partner, à la Fred Astaire; at several points through the sequence, though, she is swept into imagery of using the mop as it was intended, following it across the floor in a visual of submitting to housewifery and domesticity despite her attempts in the same scene to dispel her adherence to patriarchy and her fear of men. 

Each time Nickell emerges from the wardrobe as Duckman, the danced duets become more absurd. The red “knickers” that we see Faye remove as part of her attempts at reclamation become blown up and used as the matador’s emblematic red cloth to entice Faye-as-bull in Smith’s paso doble. The closing swing dance incorporates even more frenzied lifts, including an in-air cartwheel of sorts as Faye appears increasingly manic. And there’s another “movement piece that we all collectively worked on that we call ‘Cereal Relief,’ and it’s a moment that involves a box of cereal,” via Smith. The cereal in question is a box of Rice Krispies that sits onstage throughout the play—and which, moments after Naoise enters Faye’s home, Faye begins eating fistfuls of dry “as a snack,” in an attempt to eat more throughout the day, she claims. The dry Rice Krispies remain on the floor for the remainder of the show, snapping and crackling and popping beneath the actors’ feet in an audial reminder of the moment of madness that precedes their dispersal. 

The decision to bring Lie Low to life onstage in today’s Washington, D.C. is not accidental. As director Rex Daugherty notes in the program’s director’s note, “Our production lands in DC amongst the international scandal of the Epstein files, still in the wake of #MeToo, and the continued fallout of the only two female presidential candidates losing their election bid to a man convicted of sexual assault.” Smith noted to me that while the play was decidedly Irish thanks to its characteristic dark wit and abrasiveness, “this could easily have been an American play, and it could be set in New York rather than Dublin.” Faye and Naoise’s Irish accents and dialect place the piece, but Faye’s experience is universal—and the duets they perform are styles that hail from the United States and Spain, respectively, highlighting that the movements and occurrences that take place both prior to and during the play’s action are unplaceable. 

Faye is “forced to dance with an uncomfortable truth,” says Daugherty, again in the director’s note. Indeed, just as she reassures her brother, that the sequences throughout the piece will be “choreographed,” just like dances—even when they’re not dances—Faye dances through the play as she struggles to choreograph her way out of her life. By premeditating situations and anticipating that the way out will be to follow pre-set movements and instructions, Faye believes she can overcome her fear and trauma. But in reality, most situations can’t be anticipated, so following a set of choreography to get out of them is only a fallible attempt to make sense of the world. Instead, Faye and Naoise must both improvise their dances through life, pushing past trauma in unconventional, unchoreographed ways. Lie Low is a must-see in new Irish theatre, both for its impeccable acting and, of course, its reliance on dance. 

Audrey Brown (she/her) (@audrey.e.brown) is a mover and writer native to the D.C. region. While currently working in communications at a nonprofit in D.C., she gained experience in the nonprofit sphere from CityStep, a dance and community engagement organization based in New York City. Audrey spent much of her early life exploring the Washington performance scene, from small dance shows to the National Opera.