Review: Travels Journeys Through Song and Sadness

Billed as a “sonic narrative collection,” Travels, now running at Ars Nova, features playwright James Harrison Monaco recounting stories of himself, his friends, and people he barely knows traveling for business or pleasure, in luxury or in squalor, by choice and by force. An ensemble of Monaco, El Beh, Ashley De La Rosa, and Mehry Eslaminia inhabit the characters through singsong stream-of-consciousness tales.

Many of the more unpleasant stories come from Monaco’s friend R, a journalist and former political prisoner in Iran whose American asylum case is ongoing. In between bouts of torture and boredom on death row at Evin Prison, R read literature profusely, leading to an eventual bond with Monaco, a translator of Italian and Spanish, over language.

Though Monaco discusses the dissolution of his engagement, his research, and his playwriting, it is R’s story that most captivates in Andrew Scoville’s production, forcing us to ponder what material comforts we’d give up in exchange for our safety and how the fight to survive can kill the creative process. As we travel deeper into Monaco’s psyche and music (which is controlled by Monaco and onstage DJ John Murchison), the stories are dotted with photographs and mementos projected onto the wall of the stage. The live feed object design by Carlos Aguilar provides unique complements to each story, especially in “Guanajuato, City and State.”

Most of the interwoven stories in Travels belong to other people, even if they begin by centering Monaco’s own pain or triumphs. He admits this conceit readily — not apologizing for it, just putting it in the room. A white man, Monaco borrows the stories of people of color — an Egyptian Lyft driver, two women in central Mexico, R — not because he wants to find himself through them or prove a point about the beauty of pain and struggle, but because he loves stories. This is at least what he tells the audience, and he is enthusiastic enough to be believable.

Does that make the structure of Travels less appropriative? Monaco says in his first story, which describes one of the first times he traveled after the outbreak of Covid, that “Middle Eastern immigration to the US is something I’ve been interested in for a while.” His sincerity is awkward, but it feels genuine. Is a scholarly interest different than a personal interest? When his new Mexican friends Aurora (De La Rosa) and Sofia (Eslaminia) realize Monaco is intrigued by the gory details of Narcos violence and how it has touched their lives, they look at him differently. They go cold. He is just like the other Americans.

It’s easy to say that Monaco should have isolated his stories from those of his friends, that only R should tell R’s story and receive the plaudits or potential ticket sales. But that’s a cynical view of storytelling that doesn’t account for another harsher reality: the exhaustion of everyday life. When Monaco gets dinner with R in a later story, he is surprised to hear that his friend has stopped writing. “There’s no time for that,” R says, then admits that a man showed up at his family’s home in Iran to ask if he’d published anything new.

Maybe R, for this moment, is too tired to tell his story, to relive his days in an Iranian prison and an American immigrant detention center. Maybe Monaco is tired of rehashing the end of his engagement; maybe it’s easier if we all trade stories with each other, swapping our pain for someone else’s because the sting is unfamiliar. Maybe this structure doesn’t fit into a binary of storytelling – who should and who should not tell stories – but maybe it’s the only way to keep telling them at all.