If you have ever wondered—and it is almost certain that you have—what it would be like to control time, To Move In Time is very much a warning of the indecisive dwelling to come. Playing now at the Summerhall’s Techcube 0, To Move In Time is an extended monologue that spans the entire thought process of a simple man plagued with the power to control time, or perhaps just contemplating it.
The room he stands in is bare, but the possibilities are endless. You can just about hear his mind whirr and process through every new option. He is at a continual crossroads, yet takes the audience in flight as he obsessively dissects each path, whether that is changing the past to fix the present, predicting the future to strike it rich, or advancing to the future and warning the present.
Tyrone Huggins does an expert job at thinking through every possibility as if it’s for the first time ever. His honest and even innocent approach to contemplating his power and burden gives the show a gradual incline towards enlightenment. We are learning everything at the same exact moment that he is, even if we’ve heard each possibility before—or even dreamed about fulfilling it.
Stepping into the vacuum of time, Huggins fully emerges himself in the staggering, limitless exploration of time. He contemplates every twist and turn, every cause-and-effect, paradox, or domino-effect to exhaustion, and yet there is still an infinite amount to explore. Huggins explores the desperation of not being able to stop tragedies or else risk even larger ones, he bemoans the staggering, guilt-inducing limitations of his power and daydreams about trading it in for any other power imaginable.
Huggins’ conscious crafting of his character is fleshed out through his intimate connection with the audience. Although the entire show is focused in on a single man’s internal monologue, he seems to interact with the audience even from his psyche. Private yet performative, heroic yet inhibited, empowered yet burdened, Huggins truly weaves a complex and empathetic character as conflicted as time itself.
Overall, To Move In Time will make you feel small. But it will also acknowledge things even smaller, decisions ranging from those impossibly far out of our reach like stopping 9/11 or hindering Trump’s presidency, to choosing a sandwich over soup for lunch. Tyrone Huggins and Tim Etchells have truly partnered on an understated masterpiece that playfully meddles with time, stretching and flinging it from world-changing alterations, to the most insignificant changes.
