“Trekking to the Stars in Stairway to Stardom”

I’m at HERE Arts Center, a performance art house based in New York City, where five young women take the stage in glittering silver jumpers, engaging the audience in a group monologue speckled with humor and driven by the desire to express the overwhelming demands of happiness and self-fulfillment. This is Stairway to Stardom, written and directed by Amanda Szeglowski and inspired by the 80s cult show “Stairway to Stardom” (the older sister of “American Idol”).

Szeglowski’s Stairway to Stardom is a show about our dreams and self-worth colliding with the reality of a working world that both expresses and sometimes represses our own potential. “I have talent,” the women cry in unison onstage, and as their words punctuate an enigmatic, lavender-hued video backdrop and a stream of synthesized sounds, the young women speak, dance, and exist, statically, as a piece of our dialogue on dreams.

“So…what…so…so…what…so what are your talents?” The women chant, and answer their own questions with guided hesitancy. “I feel like I’m very creative. I have… have… have… a good sense of humor. I’m very disciplined.” The piece continues to list dead-end jobs disconnected from childhood ambitions. When we are at odds with the divide between our dreams and their encumbering reality, we assess ourselves, as the women do onstage—one of the most powerful things we can do.

Of Stairway to Stardom, Szeglowski writes, “the result is not a piece about the TV show or the people that performed on it decades ago, Stairway to Stardom is a piece about us—you and me and everyone in this room and not in this room, right now.” Stairway to Stardom is at once empowering and provocative; it illuminates the confusion we build up after living lives differently than the ones we imagined for ourselves. How do we translate our own exaggerated dreams into actions? How do we convert fantasy into fulfillment? “Ultimately, if you’re happy, I think you’ve made it,” the young women decide at the climax of the show, gesturing to the ceiling as if the sky is the limit. Happiness, in the here and now, comes first.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol