Sugar by Robbie McCauley (review)

In the New York premiere of her solo performance piece Sugar, Robbie McCauley shared her experience of living with type 1 diabetes. Although 9 percent of the US population has been diagnosed with diabetes, types 1 and 2, it is still an invisible illness that is difficult to stage, widely misunderstood by the general population, and often misrepresented in film, television, and theatre. McCauley blends her firsthand experience with diabetes to examine sugar’s impact on bodies, from the transatlantic slave trade to systemic inequities in the modern US healthcare system.

Sugar was presented at New York Live Arts in a 184-seat proscenium space as a part of the Lumberyard in the City winter festival. When I walked into the venue, the stage was dark and there was a 3D projection of a blue-and-red anatomically correct heart with blood pulsing through bright veins on a black background. A recorded conversation about low blood sugar played in the background. Onstage, there were three black folding chairs, a bundle of sugar cane on the ground stage-right, and two bags of sugar, both white and brown, tucked upstage behind a piano. The show began when the recording faded away and Chauncey Moore, who composed the music and played the piano during the performance, walked McCauley out in the dark to a seat center-stage.

McCauley carefully balanced the tone of her performance using humor, while acknowledging her sorrow as she reflected on her life with type 1 diabetes. When the lights came up she was sitting in a chair and holding a bar of dark chocolate. She wrestled with the candy wrapper and invited laughter when she looked up at the audience with an exasperated smirk. Eventually she succeeded in removing the wrapper and broke off a corner to eat. While chewing the chocolate, she reflected on her complicated relationship with sugar, how it could give one pleasure or eat someone up from the inside-out.

Robbie McCauley in Sugar. (Photo: Kate Enman.)

The most distinct way that McCauley expressed the lived experience of type 1 diabetes was to tell the story of her life—sex, marriage, school, acting—and to share the hidden ways that diabetes has impacted her. She occasionally interrupted herself to ask rhetorical questions or make observations about diabetes. While recalling the memory of her first romantic relationship, she stopped to ask, Where is the research on diabetes and sex? How it affected “down there” for women? She went on to share memories without answering her questions. Later in the show, she sat center-stage and tested her blood sugar, drew up insulin and gave herself an injection in the stomach. She told the audience she needed to use a clean needle because of the germs. Then McCauley looked up at the audience, smirked, and admitted she knows “a lot of people who live with a lot of germs.” The audience laughed. This taboo acknowledgment that someone might use the same needle more than once, for reasons such as waste, time, and money, is a reality for people living with diabetes.

Robbie McCauley in Sugar. (Photo: Kate Enman.)

The most striking metaphor occurred toward the end of the show. McCauley dragged over two bags of sugar center-stage. The bags themselves reached up to her knees and she scooped her hands into them three times, letting the sugar flow back in while white dust floated in the air, creating small white clouds. An image of the globe was behind her and she talked about Christopher Columbus knocking into America to find sugar. Requesting the audience’s participation, she asked for one word in response to her question, “What do you think about the war in Afghanistan?” People answered with “terrible,” “endless,” “relentless,” and “atrocity.” After the audience shared these words, McCauley said that diabetes is her own body at constant war with her heart and soul, which is...