Solo Fest 2025 Spotlight: Lucy London’s GRASPING AT STRAWS
Join us for PlayGround’s eighth annual Solo Performance Festival, a curation of the best in California solo performance! The festival runs until February 9, 2025 (Fri-Sun), presented live on our stage and also simulcast online. More…
Today we’re spotlighting Lucy London in Grasping at Straws (2/2 at 4pm, 2/8, 2/9 at 7pm). Grasping at Straws: Reflections on an Activist Trajectory explores the contradictions and nuances of changemaking through storytelling, poetry, movement, song, meditation, and community building. Lucy’s performance brings audiences along on her evolving theory of changemaking, from championing individual sustainability in high school as “the straw girl,” to focusing on systems change and living in Indigenous-led resistance camps fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota during the summer of 2021. Through sharing these experiences, Lucy hopes to prompt personal and community reflection and collective healing. Grasping at Straws considers the question: how do we recognize our agency among waves of other people’s theories of change, navigate the inherent and ever-present contradictions of changework, and acknowledge our interconnectedness with all things?
Hear from the playwright:
What was the seed of this play? What inspired you to write it?
I originally wrote this piece as an autoethnographic thesis for my performance studies degree. I had just returned home from studying abroad in Cuba, where my ideas of changework had all been shaken up and placed on a global scale. In 2021, I spent the summer living at Indigenous-led resistance camps protesting the Line 3 pipeline, during which my appendix burst, I got shot in the head with a rubber bullet, and spent 3 nights in jail. After this intense summer I went back to school, and experienced complete culture shock. My priorities were much different from most of my peers; I was called to live the movement, not attempt to please my parents with good grades or hoard wealth by going into finance. I held steadfast to this righteous orientation until Cuba, where my dogmatism was ruthlessly complicated, and I came back confused. So I decided to write a thesis about my own experiences, honoring the little girl I was in high school who collected used plastic straws in order to save the sea turtles. And tracking my growth and expansion of perspective since then. Since I was a performance major, I decided to turn this thesis into a solo performance where I tell my story onstage through music, movement, and storytelling.
Why is a solo show the ideal way to tell this story?
When the show was first produced, I was afraid that it would feel irrelevant, or even selfish, for me to take up so much time telling my specific story. But after performing it for two full audiences, I realized that the show was not only relevant to me, but resonated with so many people who don’t share the same life experiences as me. The power of singular story was proven to me as a useful tool of allowing an audience to see themselves in my story, while marveling at the real life human telling this story and all they’ve gone through. I recently learned about the Greek words “Zoe” and “Bios”. They both mean life, but “Zoe” is life through a broader lens, more eternal and spiritual, and “Bios” refers to the individual, smaller-scale life. By telling my “Bios” story, I aim to garner unique, human-to-human connection—audiences see me who I really am in all my vulnerabilities. They don’t have to agree with what I say, but they see the full me. And somehow this begins to illuminate “Zoe”, as I play with inviting the audience into the space with me, singing, meditating, eating sugar candy.
What are your artistic influences for this show?
My musical influences include Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch, Stephen Sondheim, and the community singing movement—a movement in which people are singing together again for the joy of it. Theatrically and in the realm of performance art, I am inspired by Marina Abromovic, Ana Mendieta, and Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry. I am also influenced by groups like the Neo-Futurists and methods such as Agosto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. My spirituality and life orientation is influenced by Josh Shrei of The Emerald Podcast, science fiction author Octavia Butler, writer and organizer adrienne maree brown, and Indigenous activist John Trudell.
What surprised you during the creation of this piece?
I was surprised by how important it felt to tell my story, both for myself and for my peers. And I was surprised by how the different methods of storytelling and connection that I have been practicing separately most of my life (singing, theatre, movement, meditation) were able to be integrated in a way that was unique and moving. I was also surprised and so grateful for the amount of energy that my friends and supporters put towards helping me make this show. Grasping at Straws would not have existed in the same way without its original director, Jordan Muhammad, and producer, Ryder McDaniel. I’m excited to see how it will evolve with input from a different group of people.
Is there anything audiences should know about you or your piece before they attend? And/or is there anything else you want to share about your piece?
This is an ongoing and evolving piece and will never be quite finished. I invite you to enter into the uncertainty of an unfinished story with me. I hope you disagree with me, I hope you challenge me, I hope your heart breaks open with mine, I hope you will sing with me and cry with me and laugh with me. And I hope you may be inspired to reflect on your own story, and tell it in your own way.
Lucy London (GRASPING AT STRAWS) is a folk musician, performance artist and opera singer from Petaluma, California. She graduated in 2023 with a degree in performance studies from Northwestern University, where she also studied classical voice and environmental policy. She wrote and created her own solo performance Grasping at Straws: Reflections on an Activist Trajectory, which debuted in Spring 2023. She has performed with international folk ensembles in Delhi, India and Greensboro, North Carolina. She also co-composed and sang the leading role in Fox & Beggar Theatre Company’s Spring 2024 production, The Paper Operetta, that will tour in Fall 2025.