A LIFE IN THE AIR

Shana Carroll’s extraordinary theatrical memoir finds
wonder in the moments between falling and flying

Well, it’s finally happened; I’ve been rendered speechless. The Attic, subtitled Things I’ve Seen While Lying on My Back, is unlike anything I’ve seen on a stage. Is it a drama? A musical? A ballet? A performance piece?

How about all of the above.

Conceived, written, directed, and choreographed by former Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist Shana Carroll, The Attic brings the Québécois acrobatic troupe The 7 Fingers to the Goodman

“I fell”

A memoir on stage, the show opens with Carroll, played by Tyler Meredith, donning a hospital gown. As she lies on her bed, she is transported to her childhood bedroom, the titular attic. From there begins a narrative that takes us from her birth through her teenage years, her first loves, her induction into the world of trapeze, her falls, and her cancer diagnosis (Carroll currently has active metastatic breast cancer). The set by Ana Cappelluto opens with several enormous, distressed-wood doors, with a metal-frame bed at the center of the stage. As the show progresses, these doors are moved to create different spaces for the dancers. Almost everything is either white or off-white, a color scheme that extends to Marie Chantale Vaillancourt’s costumes.

Johnny Ranger’s projections, which are as gorgeous and as exquisitely deployed as any projections I’ve ever seen, create the roof of Carroll’s attic bedroom: in what would be the first of my many gasp-out-loud moments, as Carroll climbs onto a swing that ascends to the heights, the roof falls away, giving way to trees with foliage that ages as she does.

Seriously, I’m slightly embarrassed by the number of times I gasped and moaned. In my defense, I was far from the only one doing so in the theatre.

There is some dialogue. Fragmentary. Occasionally blunt, mostly elusive. There are original songs by musical director Colin Gagné, sung by Meredith with a plaintive, tremulous vulnerability. Mostly, though, what there is is a collage of sound and movement as the acrobats of The 7 Fingers perform in perfect synchrony with Gagné’s stirring score.

It’s hard to convey the amount of imagination on display in this show. There’s clever use of perspective and one of the hoariest of circus tropes to hilariously depict a full-sized adult as a baby; there’s the use of mirrors to create strikingly desolate tableaux; the performers are occasionally filmed live on stage, with the film projected onto the backdrop to provide visual angles that an audience in a proscenium theatre would never get to see in real time. And that’s just off the top of my head.

That latter bit leads to one of the two most stirring sequences in the show: One of the performers, holding a camera, trails another as they dance and contort off the stage and through the aisles, before heading back to the stage and onto their backs, while in the air, a third performer twirls and contorts. From the POV of the camera, the harness is invisible, and for a few magical minutes, what we see is a man flying.

The other sequence involves the stand-in for a post-diagnosis Carroll, trapped on a hospital bed which is canted at a forty-five-degree angle, and held down by… well, you’ll have to watch the show to find out what. It’s a sequence that could be from a horror film, and I suspect it might be inspired by a particular one, but here, as the artist twists and contorts, trying to break free and failing, it takes on a loftier meaning, symbolizing the horror of disease and illness, and the instinctive human need to fight against it.

“Falling is… an inevitability. What goes up must come down.”

Death comes for us all in the end. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius famously said, “It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.” In The Attic, Shana Carroll has created a tribute to the act of living; not as an abstract concept, but as individual moments, both unimportant and seismic. It is a memoir detailing the life of one specific person, but thematically, it is as broad as life itself.

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photos by Todd Rosenberg

The Attic: Things I’ve Seen While Lying on My Back
The 7 Fingers
Goodman Theatre’s Albert Theatre in Chicago
ends on Oct. 4, 2026
for tickets ($34–$139), call 312.443.3800 or visit Goodman Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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