Ten Stories Tall

By

Kimberly Deisler

Leave it to a funeral to bring out the best in everybody. Of course, you can’t forget holidays and weddings, but funerals are really when the volume turns up on family dynamics and interpersonal dysfunctions give way for the truth to pour out like an emotional tsunami.

Ten Stories Tall focuses on two families, with lives so entwined, you almost don’t know where one ends and the other begins. The two matriarchs have known each other since childhood and have remained friends throughout years of raising families, divorce and death. When one of these women dies, all hell breaks loose for those left behind, leaving them to make difficult choices about how they ‘really’ want to spend the rest of their lives.

The pace is thoughtful, contemplative and often so poignant that when the sting of someone’s burning words strike, you’d wish the writer/director David Garrett, (story by Summer Shohfi) would speed it up to a pulling-off-a-band-aid pace in order to get through the pain. But he lingers and so do you in the weight of it all, trying, like the characters, to find your way.

Talk about suspending disbelief, with so many years of collective experience amongst cast members, its no wonder these performances were so realistic. You believe them, the years and confusion between them, the short hand with a look, or a slight. The pain is real, the scenes are real, its all too believable. Could be anyone’s family up there.

Ten Stories Tall screens at 7:00 PM at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art tonight.