Make the Distance

by Mal Cherifi

Review by Paige Anderson

Mal Cherifi is a recent Ithaca College graduate, now a Philadelphia-based artist, director, and performer, whose interests lie in devised theatre, mask making, and androgyny in performance. In this solo show, “Make the Distance,” Mal has created a moving and beautiful meditation on love, relationships, and distance.

“Everyone seems to be getting farther away and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Distance is an amount of space between two people, Mal says, and elaborates, with an emphasis on quantification: hours, minutes, seconds, street addresses, zip codes, miles, feet, and inches. “That’s my real address,” they remark, after one such elaboration, and then warn, “Don’t go there unless you’re invited.” This compelling and powerful combination of humor and pain, anxiety and courage, vulnerability and toughness, resonates throughout this show.

Mal is a kinetic, compulsively watchable actor, with impressive physical acting skills and an incredibly mobile, expressive face. When they talk about traveling in space, to the stars, they balance on a chair, seeming to float above the audience. “Experience weightlessness,” they say dreamily. And then come crashing down, emotionally as well as physically. “I knew that words could cut me,” they say, then tell stories — about being confronted in a roadside restroom, about whether a date is really a date, about their father — that are exquisite: sharply observed, funny, and then, quite suddenly, they turn and break your heart. Ultimately, when Mal says longingly, “I want to take you with me….” we want to go on that journey.