Grind Arts returns with 'The Last Five Years'

Close your eyes, and imagine you’re walking into a Broadway theater.

What comes to mind?

Neat rows of padded chairs. A luxurious curtain, probably. A glossy playbill, screaming the name of a Broadway classic — maybe Phantom — which has been performed faithfully the same way for years.

Grind Arts Company, an avant-garde theater troupe born last year on campus, is interested in precisely none of those things. You might know them as the company who produced Stephen Sondheim’s gruesome, challenging musical “Sweeney Todd”outside on the Jadwin Loading Dock last spring.

No, you read that right. Jadwin Loading Dock. Site-specific performance in unconventional venues such as this is just one way that Grind Arts Company seeks to innovate in the realm of theater. “At Grind, we want to put up shows that need to be done,” company’s founder Eamon Foley ’15 said. “They have to have a reason for existing.”

And part of Foley’s mission at Grind is to always search for newer, more relevant, more radical reasons to make theater. “We don’t ever want to do a carbon copy,” he said. “We don’t ever want to do a show simply because it will sell, simply because an actor is very fond of it and wants to do it. It has to forward the piece in some way. That can mean digging into new themes, or turning the original show on its head — but as long as a concept forwards the piece in some way, then we are fascinated with doing it.”

Having a conversation about art with someone as artistically rapacious and insatiable as Foley can be overwhelming, but here’s where we find common ground — and indeed, here is where he finds common ground with all lovers of the stage: Foley harbors a fierce and undying faith in the power of theater. He is profoundly certain that theater matters.

Doesn’t the humanity of that make you smile?

This weekend, Grind’s newest production opens at New South: a difficult space to work in, no doubt about that — but their scrappiness is a point of pride for the Grind family. The show in question is an innovation production of “The Last Five Years,” an unconventional two-person musical written and composed by Jason Robert Brown that follows the failed five-year relationship between Jamie Wellerstein, a rising novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a struggling actress. What makes this show unique is the non-traditional way in which the story is told. Cathy tells her story in reverse chronological order beginning the show at the end of the marriage, while Jamie tells his story in chronological order beginning the show at the couple’s first encounter.

How does Grind plan to forward this piece? Foley, who’s directing the production, didn’t want to give everything away, but he did give me a few hints.

“When I was mulling this show over,” Foley tells me, “I had just gone through a break-up. And I was decimated. And I found myself making this person up to be someone that he really was not. In my memories, I made him up to be a god — this person that was not real. It took me about a year to realize that I was putting this guy on a pedestal. That was dangerous. But love is a reality-altering drug, and it really skews your vision. And that’s how the concept was born.”

Foley turns to me, his tone suddenly more urgent. “This is a show about two people learning to see each other.”

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The numerous and inventive ways in which Grind’s production of “The Last Five Years” plans to foreground this theme of seeing and not seeing are impressive. The production works with projection, silhouette and dance to create hyper-realities of the on-stage characters. Foley has expanded the two-person cast to a four-person cast by adding two dancers to play the heightened, non-real versions of Jamie and Cathy. Foley stressed the necessity of dance in his production because he sees it as the way to communicate the non-pedestrian quality of love.

“Dance is where I bring in the love, the passion,” Foley said. “Love is not something that lives in our civilian world. Love is something extra-daily.”

“The Last Five Years” will star Deirdre Ricaurte’16 as Cathy and Graham Phillips ’16 as Jamie as well as Sophia Andreassi ’16 and Trent Kowalik ’17 as their dancing shadow selves. The show will take place in New South from October 10 through October 12 at 8 p.m., with an additional 3 p.m. matinee on the 12th. The show will move for its second weekend to the Fields Center multipurpose room, and will play there at 8 p.m. on October 16-17, and at 3 p.m. on October 18. This production is Student Events Eligible. Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for adults. Seating is limited, so get your tickets early!