Hey, People Who Walked Out of Faith Helma’s I HATE POSITIVE THINKING! Here’s What You Missed!

• via Faith Helma

Last Friday night, at least three people walked out of Faith Helma’s Fertile Ground performance of I HATE POSITIVE THINKING at the Shout House in inner Southeast. I know because they were sitting right behind me, and I heard them leave. Meanwhile, the rest of us sipped complimentary mint tea out of mismatched mugs and watched Helma’s deeply weird meditation on failure, rage, apologizing, the temporal limitations of psychics, and the false promise of positive thinking. A girl near the front smiled the entire time. At one point, I think I saw actual tears in the eyes of another theatergoer. I HATE POSITIVE THINKING may not be for everyone, but the emotional payoff is real.

So I was surprised when I noticed the walkouts. Did they not know that Helma’s an ensemble member of one of Portland’s more out-there theater companies? Did they not realize they were attending Fertile Ground, a festival that is known for being proudly uncurated and open to all manner of weirdness? What had they expected? What were they missing?

Perhaps by way of explanation, one left a note behind insinuating that what they had just seen wasn’t really theater! But while Helma’s performance didn’t seem as strong as the shorter version I saw at last summer’s Risk/Reward performance festival, it was definitely theater. A play doesn’t stop being a play just because someone—or even everyone—dislikes it. If that were the case, I could just blithely sit here, poofing bad art out of existence. Guess what, it doesn’t work like that!

As for Helma’s piece, she’d added in new elements that I was glad to be present for—including a segment where she reads out loud from a stack of rage-filled notecards to angry music, serving as a more than worthy proxy for the fury of the people whose words are written on the cards. You can even give her your own rage-card, if you have something to get off your chest.

Evocative as this was of professional mourning—enacting uncomfortable emotions by transferring them to a proxy who can safely express them for you—Helma’s rage performance was weirdly cathartic. I was especially gratified to know that someone at a previous performance else had written down street harassment response no. 1—”Don’t tell me to smile!”—because that’s what I would have written, if I’d been feeling less wimpy about participatory theater. That’s an offhand way of admitting that, yes, it’s true, Helma’s wacky machinations kind of… helped me?

MOVING ON. There were some pretty uncomfortable moments in the updated show: I am pretty gung ho for weird, but I don’t ever want to hold hands with strangers unless I’m on an airplane during turbulence (SORRY!). And a segment on the possibility of forgiving Hitler was deeply weird, not because forgiving people for doing awful things is an unworthy pursuit—in fact, I think it’s the opposite—but because Hitler is a really loaded figure for some, and, you know, Holocaust survivors exist. Maybe we could try to forgive someone less potentially triggering? Or maybe that was the point! I don’t know.

In any case, I HATE POSITIVE THINKING is a weird show that keeps getting weirder, and definitely the only performance I’ve seen that’s helped me process my angry feelings about street harassment. I guess it’s not for everybody, but I can’t wait to see what it looks like in its next iteration. And I bet smiling girl and crying lady can’t, either.