While young adults are experiencing their childhood, they often don’t realize the impact of the time period until much later. Even then, the introspection about the environment and relationships that defined adolescence are kept within self-conversations or journal writing. However, one local budding star of the stage is putting herself out there all the way, dispensing the complexities of her youth to two captive audiences.
On Friday and Saturday evening, Kyla Frieden will lay bare her tribulations and successes at the Santa Monica Playhouse for her one-woman show Chasing Goys, a twisted tribute to her childhood relying on theatrical cues and mixed media messages from her time on stage and in film production. Beginning at 7:30 p.m. each night, Frieden will share the "culmination" of two years spent in Los Angeles by getting back to the stage setting she loves, espousing tales of her childhood crushes and relationships with her family.
"The process [was] really cathartic, [it] sort of started and it was just a little bit of word vomit, and it [was) autobiographical, so it was just really seeing if I had something there, and then once I [felt] like it could be a coherent narrative, then it was about actually thinking about how can I make this a theatrical experience that keeps people engaged, and isn’t just me reading out my memoir," Frieden said. "That was kind of the challenging part."
Once she connected the dots of her youth through a new "more mature" lens, Frieden began on the engagement aspect, soliciting opinions from colleagues about visual, audio and lighting cues. She added that she used her experience from attending Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, to craft cues that elicited audience response, still wanting the show to be as "barebones as possible" but finding it "amazing how simple and effective it can be to use light and sound to convey a certain theme."
The show’s themes include her time at a private elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, differentiating herself from her family, and her evolving love and sexual life. Although the Chasing Goys story is intensely personal, Frieden wrote the show in an accessible way to everyone in attendance this weekend.
"I think throughout I was trying to strike the balance of it [being] very specific to me, but I also want it to feel universal, because I know that it won’t be interesting to hear something that’s only relevant to me," she said. "So I think it was constantly threading that needle of something that has specificity, but also I hope will resonate with the larger audience."
Growing up Jewish in the Boston suburbs, her time in the Cambridge school was jokingly described as "very not Jewish" with fellow students who looked like "they just stepped off the Mayflower." Though she pokes fun at her childhood companions, she realized that her way to differentiate herself from a sometimes overbearing family was to pursue things [including boys] who fell outside of the Jewish community.
"That’s sort of where this idea of the goy comes from, just an embodiment of anything that was other, because in trying to find my own identity I sort of reached for something that felt so unfamiliar to me," Frieden added.
Another focus is on the raunchiness of her adolescent romantic encounters, incorporating mixed media such as a parody of Hamilton’s "Ten Duel Commandments" and a "Mad Libs" style fill-in-the-blank story to describe losing her virginity. That part of her life was a "fun piece" to revisit, she said, and that her feelings were easier to convey using these theatrical tools.
Frieden’s parents may be in for a shock when they fly out from the east coast to see the show, as the performer didn’t give away much of what she was going to say about her familial relationships. She said that her parents are "very supportive" and that she "love[s] them a lot," but that they’re also "very kooky and fun to make fun of," adding that "they have enough confidence in themselves" to receive the good-natured ridicule.
"I think what’s fun is that [our] relationship is still a work in progress and it’s still evolving," she said of her parents. "It’s not like I reach any one conclusion at the end of the show, but I do know that my intent in writing it was sort of a love letter to my mom almost, in a lot of ways. One that makes a lot of fun of her and can be a little bit, I guess, brutal at times … I think they’ll be surprised by some of the things in it, but most of it is probably stuff they’ve kind of heard before, [and] I’m very interested to see how they react to it."
After the one-off performances, Frieden hopes Chasing Goys can have future installments at the Playhouse and beyond, and hopes to have a follow-up where she marries "a nice Jewish man."
"This is all just you, for better or for worse, and I think there’s a lot of it that I’m doing for the first time … I’m just figuring out as I go," she said of the process. "But I think it is something that’s very doable, and allows you to kind of just take control of your own narrative."
To purchase tickets to Chasing Goys, visit the website here.
