The Attic: Things I’ve Seen While Living on my Back

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“An Intimate Journey Through the Rooms We Carry Within Us” The Attic at Goodman Theatre thru October 4th - Review By: Paul Lisnek

****/4

“An Intimate Journey Through the Rooms We Carry Within Us”

“The Attic Things I’ve Seen While Lying on My Back” is an astonishing work: tender in its attention to private grief, playful in its imagination, and ultimately powerful in the way it gives shape to the things we carry in us when language alone is insufficient to do so. Created by Shana Carroll, with music composition and direction by Colin Gagné, the piece is not a conventional play by any means, but more of an invitation into the hidden architecture of memory—those strange, tender rooms of the mind where loss, wonder, fear, and love coexist.

Carroll’s title evokes childhood innocence: the experience of lying on the floor, looking upward, and watching as an ordinary ceiling or attic become vast, mysterious, and alive. The production understands that when we are small—and perhaps vulnerable—the world above and around us can become our entire universe. An attic is much more than storage. It is a repository of discarded objects, our old selves, family history, half-remembered stories, and emotional debris that survives long after we think we have moved on.

What makes Carroll’s work so perfect is its refusal to explain the mysteries it creates. Instead, she trusts the audience to encounter the piece emotionally and intuitively. Its images seem to emerge from the delicate intersection between being awake and dreaming, where a forgotten object becomes a companion, a shadow becomes a threat, and a moment of silence can hold the weight of the past. There is a childlike awareness in the work, but it’s never childish. For, Carroll imagination is not escape, it’s survival. It does not demand us to feel; it reminds us what feeling can be. The work’s intimacies—its pauses, visual surprises, moments of humor and human fragility—come together with extraordinary care. We are not just observing a story from a safe distance; We are brought inside its emotional atmosphere.

This is more than a play with music. Gagné’s music is essential to the experience. More than underscoring the action, his composition and musical direction provide the production’s pulse and I’d say, subconscious. The score seems to co-exist with the characters. At times, the music feels like a house settling around a family’s secrets; at other moments, it provides a deep breath or amazement.

Together, Carroll and Gagné create a unique theatrical language. This collaboration understands that life’s most consequential moments are not neat narratives. They can be fragments: a sound from another room, a glimpse of light under a door, the sensation of being watched by your own memory, and even a sudden realization that an object once seemed meaningless is now ready to tell us something important.

The Attic Things I’ve Seen While Lying on My Back understands the tenderness and strength required to look backward. This is not nostalgia for its own sake, nor is it just a visual spectacle. Instead, it asks us to revisit the places—literal and emotional—where we once felt alone, frightened, or perhaps safe and deeply loved. Its answer is not simple, but it is generous.

This is an evening of theater that lingers with you. Long after it ends, one may just find yourself looking at the familiar rooms of your own home differently: a corner, a shadow, an old item tucked away somewhere overhead. 

Indeed, Carroll reminds us that the attic is always there—above us, and within us— it is filled with the things we have lost, kept, buried, and somehow actually never stopped seeing.

The Attic plays at the Goodman Theatre through October 11th.

Tickets can be purchased at www.GoodmanTheatre.org