The Lost Hours of Melissa Lorraine
On September 8, 2017,
Melissa Lorraine walked into the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Streeterville, accompanied by her friend Katie Stimpson and Stimpson’s boyfriend. Lorraine was shaken and confused, so Stimpson had agreed to do the talking. But she lost her nerve when they reached the reception desk. Intimidated by the mostly male staffers gathered there, Stimpson couldn’t think of anything discreet enough to say when a nurse asked what the problem was.
“And then she said something so metaphysical,” Lorraine recalls. Nodding toward Lorraine, Stimpson told the nurse, “She lost some time.”
Lorraine and Stimpson laugh ruefully now when they tell that story. It’s just the kind of bleak joke they both enjoy. Because although it mystified the nurse and failed to communicate the ugly reason for their visit to the ER, Stimpson’s answer was perfectly accurate. Lorraine had, in fact, lost some time during the early hours of that Friday morning — along with a good many other things.
Slight and introspective, Melissa Lorraine, 40, is an actor and a director who cofounded Theatre Y, a resolutely edgy company with a taste for avant-garde texts and intense ensemble work. This spring, it staged Self-Accusation, a play by Austrian provocateur Peter Handke consisting of deceptively mundane statements (“I was able to do something. I was able to fail to do something”) that underline the tensions between the individual and the social order. Parts of the highly ritualized production unfolded in front of the performance space. “I love work that creates a riot inside the individual watching it,” she told the Chicago Reader in 2013.
The months leading up to her visit to the ER were actually pretty good for Lorraine. She and her husband, Evan Hill, had spent the summer with colleagues and friends, walking the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that stretches for hundreds of miles through Europe and culminates at a cathedral in northwest Spain. The trip was a kind of extreme organizational retreat for Theatre Y as well as an artwork in itself, featuring performances on the road and activities that will form part of an upcoming piece called The Camino Project.
Afterward, at the end of August 2017, Lorraine moved into an architecturally significant building on a leafy side street in Old Town. True, her apartment was small and subterranean (she called it “the servants’ quarters”), and she was likely to be alone in it most of the time, as Hill would be pursuing his doctorate in dramaturgy at Yale. But it was convenient to
