In Lauren Groff’s short story “Annunication,” onstage in San Francisco in a Word for Word production, the unnamed narrator describes a crucial coming-of-age period. After graduating from college, she leaves home abruptly, secretly, silently, and heads West to a sort of mythical San Francisco.
Staying temporarily in a youth hostel in Chinatown, she is invited to form a threesome with the Brazilian couple in the lower berth of the bunk bed they share. Escaping to the bathroom, she stares at herself in the mirror, at the new person she is becoming. Would she be someone who would join a threesome? She would not. “I regret this decision, as I regret all the times in my life that I turned away from living,” she says.
The brief period that she lived in the Bay Area (specifically in a sort of fairytale cottage in Mountain View) turns out to have been a time when she in fact did decidedly not turn away from living.
As the scenes unfold, the ways in which she seized upon life—or, rather, immersed herself in the lives of others—seem puzzling.
During that period, the narrator becomes obsessed with the plight of a co-worker who lives in a van with her little girl.
She also becomes devoted to her odd, perhaps even mentally unstable landlady, who keeps a vicious dog tied up in the yard.
And she receives sustenance from a big tree in the backyard. “It is like a triangulation—the world, the tree, and me,” she tells the landlady in one of their many chats.
Reading Groff’s story (originally published in The New Yorker and now online), I struggled to understand and fully empathize with the narrator and hoped that Word for Word’s trademark verbatim staging of literary works would add insight that somehow the words on the page did not. The San Francisco troupe often conjures such theatrical magic.
And as always, under Joel Mullennix’s sensitive direction, the company loads “Annunciation” with color and humor. In this case, just the right degree of animated details to bring the text to life without distracting from its literary essence.
Rosie Hallett is a touching, sympathetic narrator indeed, and other characters—Patricia Silver as the implacable and eccentric landlady; Molly Rebekka Benson as the religiously devout coworker; Brennan Pickman-Thoon as the mastiff; and Monica Rose Slater and JoAnne Winter in a variety of roles—are all terrific.
But the story nevertheless remains frustratingly opaque — tantalizing, provocative, but elusive.
Who the narrator is, what she knows about life that we don’t, never sufficiently coalesces despite the delicate theatricality with which Word for Word enriches Groff’s text.
Word for Word’s “Annunciation” continues through July 13 at Z Below, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $45-$60 at zspace.org.
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