From Alaska, this season’s opener from the Belfry has now long closed and their next show, 1939 is very nearly on its feet.

Despite this, I spent enough time considering From Alaska that I wanted to share my thoughts on the show. I wasn’t sure I got the show, so I met up at a lovely cafe and picked the brain of another theatre goer whose opinion I highly regard.

A minor warning for spoilers ahead, but the show is finished so I hope it’s not going to bother anyone.

The show features the spectacularly talented duo of Brenda Robins as Miss and Kosta Lemermeyer as Today. If the names haven’t tipped you off, we as an audience aren’t going to “get” these characters fully. There will always be ambiguity and uncertainty.

And that’s that the crux of it. How much uncertainty and lack of ambiguity can an audience accept? How much do we need to know before we are lost in our own tidal waves of the unknown?

We should be bold enough to sit in the unknowable and take what we can from the story. Today’s story is so heartbreaking, and Miss, well, I just wanted to know more about her.

And this is where I get a bit itchy – I want to know more. It’s billed as a play about identities, and those do matter, but in not getting to know more, in some way I felt this play erased the value of those identities.

I have no statistical breakdown to prove this to be true, but it feels as though a disproportionate number of older women on stage are relegated to the roles of shrieking harpy or dying to teach us all a lesson. Miss falls into the latter category, and I don’t know why.

It was, from the perspective of a production, stunning. Beautifully scored and the projections were spot on. The lighting and the set created a time and place that was real and ethereal, all at the same time.All the technical elements came together in a way that felt, real and honest, and at other times floating in a sort of magical realism mixed with time skips and loops, a real backwards Jeremy Bearimy approach to time.

I have my own thoughts of what I think might have happened, but every time I tried to come up with a solution, I remembered something from the show that made my narrative fail to work.

I will say this: It is a show that demanded to be discussed. A show that asked us to think, really think about big picture ideas through the lens of two people. And just because I struggled to sit in the uncertainty doesn’t mean the production or the script itself wasn’t good.

I am, however, even more excited than I was before to see what this season will bring. Bravo to all who worked on this challenging production – it was masterful theatre!

Disclaimer: I received free tickets to the show as a result of other volunteer work I do. No review was expected or requested.