The Memphis Medium

November 7, 2009
Memphis Matters
by Mary Allison Cates

While on a late night gallivant down Beale Street during a recent visit to Memphis from their home in Montana, Marion and her husband Jim floated the idea of moving to the river city. But the sobering morning light assured them that they must have been joking. They could never leave their beloved Montana, the only home Marion had ever known.

As it turns out, the joke was on them. The young couple arrived at Saturday night’s Playback performance from their new condo in downtown Memphis. When they learned that Jim’s job would necessitate a move southeast, they began to dread leaving Montana. Memphis had given them a memorable one-night-stand, but would a serious, committed, long-term relationship with this place ever really work out? Marion and Jim had their doubts.

But during a walk in South Main with her two Greyhounds, something shifted in Marion’s regard for Memphis. She explains, “There was music on every corner, there were friendly people everywhere, and the people at Spindini even offered my dogs some water… All of a sudden, I said to myself, ‘I love it here!’” When founder and director of Playback Memphis Virginia Murphy asks Marion to pinpoint what about this simple moment made her feel at home, Marion shrugs and says, “I have no idea. There is just something about this place. It’s something in the air.”

++++++

Lindsey has tried to leave Memphis many times. “I’ve had like three going away parties,” she reports to Saturday’s audience. “I’ll move away for a year or so, but somehow I always end up coming back. Now, I’ll be driving in my car and randomly think, ‘I really do like it here.’’

“What keeps bringing you back here?” Virginia asks.

The young woman, originally from Clarksville, TN struggles to name it. “It’s just a feeling I get…. More than the place I grew up, more than anywhere else, this place is mine.”

++++++

“I feel like I’ve been stagnating,” Uele says to Virginia, as part of a story she titles, “Should I Stay or Should I Grow?” For the young woman, who makes her living selling health food and herbal remedies, traveling and moving to new places have always been a way for her to reach her full potential. But Memphis is now not only the place that lured her for school. Ten years later, it is the center of her livelihood and the birthplace of her five-year-old daughter, who adamantly opposes the idea of relocating.

Uele describes Memphis as a place she once tried to leave. “It called me back in,” she says. “I have a deep love for the community [here] that I’ve never felt anywhere else I’ve lived.” Though she is trying to discern whether a new urban setting would be best for her and her child, she envisions such a move not as leaving Memphis behind, but as a chance to take with her everything the city has taught her. But when pressed to articulate the kind of teaching that Memphis has offered, Uele is vague. “It’s the Memphis culture…I’ve blanketed myself in it. I love it.”

+++++++

Though we breathe in the essence of Memphis, we make it ours, and we wrap ourselves up in it, we still cannot fully capture it. This is why the Playback process is particularly suited for Memphis. The city is an endlessly complex medium.

For example, when Marion relays a linear history of her conflicting regard for Memphis, the actors respond with a clamoring, multi-part symphony that represents the couple’s Beale Street sentiments, relocation anxiety, and South Main wonderment all at once. The piece offers a timeless way view ourselves and our city. It reveals that we are simultaneously our pasts, our presents, and our futures, and that Memphis is this way too.

In other cases, clarity comes when audience members, telling their stories, surprise themselves with the truths they speak. Such was the case for Lindsey, who said that she realized as she was talking that while she was establishing herself in Memphis, Memphis was surreptitiously establishing itself in her.

In still other cases, the playback process makes the implicit explicit. Uele’s description of her dilemma about whether to stay in Memphis came across as one woman’s plight. But the actors presented her in a web of human relationships. Glenda Mace, who plays the heroine, ties green scarves around the necks of those who benefit from Uele’s work. Joe Murphy, who plays the part of Uele’s daughter, ties a happy orange scarf bow around Uele’s ankle and a nearby chair. The piece ends when this scarf web is being stretched in many directions. Perhaps it is the relationships that wrap around us like a blanket and follow us wherever we go. Perhaps we can really only understand ourselves in context.

As Virginia says in her introduction to all of the “Memphis Matters” shows, our city “is an intense place. In order to make a life here, we must be able to hold a lot, psychically.” The Playback process, with its collaborative narrative, sheds light on those things about ourselves and our city that we struggle to grasp. And in bringing us together with others seeking to name these complexities, Playback itself becomes part of the fabric of the city – this place that invites us in, calls us back, and goes with us wherever we go.