Hosts Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel are well-suited to present
these kinds of stories. Public radio listeners will recognize them
from shows each helped create
and regularly contributed to:
Radiolab and This American Life.
Drawing from the storytelling
aspect of both series, which regularly would focus on a specific
topic and then find multiple angles around said topic, Invisibilia
interweaves personal stories
and dynamic new psychological
and brain science. However, it
will not be dry and clinical, and
sometimes it might shock you.
For illustrative purposes, the
first episode is summarized as:
Are our dark thoughts about
ourselves a reflection of some
kind of inner reality about us?
Do we need to pay attention and
be guided by them, or should
we just ignore them? Without
giving too much away, the first
show is broken into two charac-
ter studies, each delving into a
form of obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD). In specific to the
first of the two stories, a man is
plagued by thoughts of doing
harm, thoughts he finds frightening, abhorrent, and uncontrollable. The question of whether
that does, or does not, indicate
something about him internally gets at what the show is all
about.
New Jersey Stage spoke with
Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller to
find out more about this intriguing new series.
For anyone who has not yet
heard the show, could you describe the premise of Invisibilia?
Alix Spiegel: Invisibilia is a show
about all the invisible things that
shape human behavior, stuff like
thoughts and emotions, beliefs
and assumptions, and all those
things you can’t physically lay
out on a table but which have a
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