"The cliches are unfortunately true": Karin McCracken on Heartbreak Hotel
Fresh from RISING Festival Melbourne, the Edinburgh Fringe, and Soho Theatre London, Heartbreak Hotel is a synth-studded dissection of a serious breakup. It combines storytelling with science and a soundtrack of your favourite classic breakup songs to explore what heartbreak does to our bodies, and hopes to leave us feeling a little better. Ahead of Heartbreak Hotel’s stay at the IPAC from August 12th to 15th, I sat down with creator and performer Karin McCracken to learn more about this five-star package.
Asher: Do you want to kick off by telling us a bit about yourself and Heartbreak Hotel?
Karin: I’m a writer and a performer based in Pōneke Wellington, in Aotearoa New Zealand. And the show is a play, or a contemporary performance, about the physiological experience of being heartbroken. We’re blending a few different forms in the show, there’s elements that feel like a traditional play, like heavy dialogue scenes, which bring in a lot of memoir, or, I guess, autofic. There’s these direct addresses that I do to the audience where I talk about the science of heartbreak and what happens to our bodies. And then there’s songs – I learnt how to play the synth, or a kind of pidgin version of the synth, playing some classic breakup songs.
A: What led you to the idea for the show?
K: I was heartbroken. I found that what I wanted to do was reach to the culture to make myself feel better, you know, pop culture, mainstream culture, art, movies, all that. And there wasn’t much that made me feel better. I felt like stuff that I was absorbing was either really schlocky, stupid, ‘at the end of the film the heartbroken person finds someone else to fall in love with, and that’s their salvation!’ Or really depressing and grim, like, ‘well, your life’s ruined and there’s no point in attempting to continue.’ So what I longed for was something that I could watch that would feel real and authentic, but would also be kind of soothing at the end, and that’s what I set out to write.
A: Can I ask what makes a great breakup song great, or how you chose the songs for the show?
K: There’s probably a musicality response to this that I don’t have the chops for. But for me, part of what makes a great breakup song is when you intersected with that song in your life and what it meant for you. So, one of the songs that we include is Bonnie Raitt’s ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’, which I would say from a musical standpoint is, like, the perfect breakup song. It’s primarily piano and Bonnie’s really extraordinary voice, and the lyrics are so true and so sad and there’s no attempt to sugarcoat it, really. It’s kind of neutral, it’s so matter of fact, you know, the chorus is ‘I can’t make you love me if you don’t / I can’t make your heart feel something it won’t’, which feels very true to the experience of being broken up with or falling out of love with someone. And for me, that song came along in my early 20s, when someone very close to me went through a really big breakup and they were listening to it obsessively. So I think it’s a marriage of, like, the quality of the music, but also how you came to know that the song existed.
A: So, as well as being the writer, you’re also one of the performers of Heartbreak Hotel. It’s – presumably – quite an intense story. What’s it like to do that every night?
K: It’s fun! It’s fun. We’ve done the show now more than 100 times, so I think any of the intensity is married a little bit to the newness of the material. Simon Leary is the other performer, this incredible performer, based in Wellington as well. And when we were first rehearsing the material, we were doing quite a lot of crying, but now it’s just this really great experience where I can feel the intensity of the reaction from the audience, but we’re both so in control of the material. It’s quite fun, and Simon is so fun to play with, he’s such a reactive and hilarious performer that it’s a positive experience to me. I’d say it’s cathartic – I think that word’s kind of overused, but it’s cathartic for me. And often, I think, for the audience.
A: Your background is in sexual violence prevention, and you previously created a show for young people called Yes Yes Yes about healthy relationships and consent. How did that knowledge inform Heartbreak Hotel – did it come into the room at all?
K: It probably did. Certainly how we work with audiences in Yes Yes Yes – Yes Yes Yes is a solo show, it’s just me, and because of the content of that show, we have to be really careful. As a performer I have to be really mindful of the audience, I have to kind of hold the audience and facilitate a room that feels powerful but safe. And that’s partly because of working with young people, and also partly because we’re talking about negative sexual experiences and traumatic experiences. I think that Heartbreak is obviously not the same as that, but it does bring up feelings for people. And so I’m very aware of the impact it can have on someone when they’re thinking about something that’s sad.
K: I also think a big part of sexual violence prevention – especially at the primary level, preventing harm before it happens, so lots of the work I was doing in schools – is about emotional literacy. Understanding how you feel about something and how someone else feels about something is actually a much bigger part of the pedagogy around it than I think people realise. I’d say that that is the central thing – knowing yourself and knowing how you feel and sort of managing how you feel is a central question of heartbreak, after the fact. So those two things, I think, are quite linked in my mind.
A: What do you hope audiences will take from the show? Is there a message or lesson you want us to come away with, or do you just want us to have a really great time?
K: The primary thing is I love seeing theatre. I make theatre because I love theatre, and I hope that people who are going for a quality theatre experience get that. I hope they leave and feel like they saw something, you know, a good piece of theatre that fills them in the way that we hope good art does. I probably have that hope before any particular message around heartbreak. But, that said, I do know that there is a section of our audience that are there because they’re heartbroken. And for them, I’d say… the cliches are unfortunately kind of true with heartbreak, like, it’s darkest before the dawn, those sorts of things. If someone walks into the show feeling bereft, and they’re not sure how they can survive this feeling, [they leave] with the knowledge that many, many other people have felt that way and have survived it, and that they have the tools to survive it. And I hope that they laugh! It’s actually quite a funny show, and that’s on purpose. I can tell when people are heartbroken, because of the way they look at me from the audience, and when I see them laugh I feel particularly buoyed. Like, this is a good experience, for everyone to be doing this together.
Heartbreak Hotel plays at the IPAC’s Bruce Gordon Theatre from the 12th to the 15th of August. Don’t miss out! Book your tickets now at merrigong.com.au.
