New Jersey Stage January 2015 | Page 113

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 Read each issue at www.NJArtsMag.com pg 113