Fair Trade (Capsule Review)

[Original publication: No Proscenium, 5/9/23]

It could have been a lunch hour. We were sitting in a park on the San Diego Bay. Spandexed runners blew by. The show was only an hour long, but there was no lunch. Instead, we had an existential investigation of fairness.

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Fair Trade is described as “a game and immersive experience focused on personal and communal transformation through play.” Two strangers converge on opposite sides of a curtain. Each participant brings three objects for a potential trade (with varying degrees of attachment to those offerings). Sitting within their view is a facilitator (usually performed by creators Jessica Creane or Yannick Trapman-O’Brien), who guides them through negotiations with care, humor, and vulnerability.

Wonder and awe often arrive from big spectacle, be it human made or the natural world. Fair Trade takes a different approach. Although “personal and communal transformation” sounds — and is — lofty, “small” encounters like these have intimate fulcrums. In place of spectacle is a gentle, incremental unfolding. Through a nuanced mix of proposition and choice, the facilitator accompanies participants as they examine fairness, a concept that seems as fundamental as breathing.

With The Telelibrary, an earlier work by Trapman-O’Brien (still running after more than 1,500 performances), he cultivates a specific kind of anonymous intimacy, one where solitude is a path to connection, both to others and to oneself. With Fair Trade, Creane and Trapman-O’Brien designed a new container for anonymous, cooperative dialogue. Through this shared exploration, internal truths and deep uncertainties reveal themselves. Instead of solitude as a path to connection, it’s communion as a path to introspection.

Ignited by the game’s exchanges, Fair Trade becomes a space to contend with, for, and even “against” oneself. Internal debate is concurrent with external negotiation. The production centers an idea that embodies incredible tension: one we take for granted and one that can erupt with volatility. The resulting distillation of what fairness could be and how we evaluate it feels fresh and life-affirming. Through their individual practices and now as a team, Creane and Trapman-O’Brien are fluent operators. They navigate the tenuous threads of humanity with such grace and artistry that, in the end, a part of yourself is revealed; something that may have felt unknowable, even to you, rises to the surface to be seen and given away.