Written just before the pandemic but developed during that unprecedented time of isolation, Adam Szymkowicz’s Such Small Hands carries within its DNA a concentrated intimacy. As theatres shuttered and artists retreated to their homes, play development moved into the virtual realm. Through screens and digital connections, artists found new ways to explore and refine theatrical works despite the unprecedentedness of it all. This constraint – the inability to gather in large groups, to feel the energy of a full rehearsal room – paradoxically enhanced the play’s examination of intimate human connection.
Perhaps it’s fitting that a play about the profound connection between two people emerged from a time when human connection felt simultaneously precious and precarious. The forced isolation of the pandemic brought into sharp focus the small daily rituals that bind us together – the morning coffee, the shared jokes, the gentle touches – elements that form the heart of Paul and Marie’s story. The play’s intense focus on these minute interactions reflects both its development process and its thematic concerns.
Just as Paul and Marie navigate their increasingly confined world, the artists developing the piece worked within their own limitations. When in-person work became possible again, it happened in small, careful pods of regularly tested artists—but still lacked the most essential component, a live audience. The careful, measured approach to returning to live performance paralleled the delicate dance of Paul and Marie’s changing relationship – the way they must redefine their intimacy as their world contracts.
This World Premiere production speaks powerfully to universal experiences of love, loss, and mortality while maintaining an almost microscopic focus on the details of one couple's shared life. The title’s reference to the final lines of E.E. Cummings’ 1931 poem “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond” celebrates how the smallest gestures can contain infinite meaning.
[..] (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
“somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond,” by EE Cummings (1931).
Hands are not just a metaphor for the power of human connection, but a reminder of the power of focused, intimate storytelling in recovering after prolonged fear and isolation. Fortunately, the constraints of pandemic-era playmaking are fading memories, but the stories it shaped are emerging as proof of the resiliency of theatre and the power it wields in human connection. And finally, it is time for Paul and Marie’s story to exist fully as a piece of theatre with the shared intimacy of a live audience.
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