Far From Home Close To Love. Etcetera Theatre.

In Far From Home Close To Love young German writer and performer Benjamin Kelm tells the intensely personal story of a two year sojourn as a drama student at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts. The location is The Big Apple but the theme – the isolation, overwhelming sense of loneliness, and feelings of despair that can result from a move from home to a new city – are universal. Kelm deserves credit for the clarity of his observations, the insight he brings to his experiences, and the intimacy of his storytelling. The result is 55 minutes of gently comic monologue and poetry that charms in its simplicity. Slight, even consciously unambitious as the piece is, it deserves an audience.

Kelm’s recollections will be recognisable to many New York neophytes: the queue at JFK immigration for a brusque (if not downright rude) border interrogation, the unpredictable phone signals, the street crazies and subway beggars, and that all-powerful street odour that smells like a mixture of “gasoline, burnt fat, and food leftovers”. Kelm is destined to share a bug-ridden (soon to be burgled) apartment with a cohort of interns who view his acting studies with suspicion verging on hostility.

Unable to make friends Kelm takes to joining numerous walking tours and discovers a new “superpower”: an uncanny ability to invite the unwanted attentions of men a great deal older than him. It is a moot point whether Kelm’s fellow walkers “Robbie and Gregory” are really hitting on him or merely being friendly. But the puzzle starkly reminds us of one the challenges involved in moving to a new culture, that of interpreting unfamiliar behaviours through our own (occasionally provincial) cultural lenses.

The challenge Kelm faces, how to “be on my own but not feel alone”, is rendered with lucidity. He copes partly by writing poetry, some of which he recites in Far From Home Close To Love, and partly by dissociating into a kind of internal safe space. “I was there, but not there” he says of drinking endless espressos in Manhattan coffee bars. He learns to “stand still while everything else is in motion”. The strategies are not entirely successful; at one point Kelm comes close succumbing to depression. He talks of the urge to stand in Time Square shouting “here I am” to passersby.

Kelm concludes from his experiences is that the “absence of love” can sometimes feel like a force stronger than love itself. It is not an entirely original observation but, like the piece as a whole, it is worth listening to.

Writer and Director:  Benjamin Kelm