Finding Joy while Faking It: talking about the world of air guitar with AIRNESS playwright Chelsea Marcantel and actress Michelle Chin

Michelle Chin in Airness at The Phoenix Theatre Company
photo by Reg Madison

by Julia Bashaw

Taking the risk to write about something that's both unknown and slightly out of the ordinary can be either a big flop or a huge success. Thankfully for Chelsea Marcantel it looks like her new play Airness is on the path to success. While in college, she decided to write a play based on the real world sport of competitive air guitar. The show makes its Phoenix debut this week at The Phoenix Theatre Company.

“I’ve known about the world of air guitar for a long time,” Marcantel said. “I knew I needed to bring a play into my post-graduate class at Julliard a couple of years ago and I had just written two heavy family dramas and I thought, 'I want to write a play that is fun!' I remembered about this world of competitive air guitar and I thought 'well this might be something.' I did a bit more research and was like 'oh yeah, this is great.' ”

Discovering that competitive air guitar was a real sport in the world was a surprising realization for most people, including Michelle Chin, the lead in the upcoming production at The Phoenix Theatre Company.

Chelsea Marcantel
photo by Gregory Costanzo

“I didn’t know of its existence until they announced that they were doing this show in their season,” Chin explained. “I was fascinated and went and looked up a bunch of things and thought it was really interesting. When I read the script I knew I wanted to audition because it’s such a unique, funny, and sometimes absurd kind of story and world but it also has so much heart in it. I think that’s what really drew me to it, these misfits and how their passion is so infectious.”

 The story of Airness is about a girl named Nina, who joins this group of people who participate in competitive air guitar and they teach her what she needs in order to succeed.

 “It is a bit like a sports underdog movie, like a sports underdog comedy,” explained Marcantel. “People who are competitive air guitarists do refer to it as a sport. The play has elements of that kind of fish out of water, a person enters a world they don’t know anything about and wants to be a champion and then has to figure out how to overcome their own insecurities and how to navigate the system to become the champion.”

Chin has gotten to discover Nina’s character for herself and really live through the production with her. She explained that the cast and crew say the play is a little like the breakfast club, a group of misfits who are all passionate about air guitar. And each character explains something about the real competitive air guitar realm.

“Each character represents the six pillars of air guitar and how that is presented within each of their performances,” Chin started to explain. “There is artistic merit, originality, feeling, technical ability, charisma, and airness. Nina, my character is the sixth pillar, airness, which is the hardest to describe. Even in the script the characters try to explain it to Nina, and they say 'you can’t really explain it you just have to achieve it.' It’s like the inner rockstar that’s inside of us and how you can tap into that rockstar persona and let that all out.”

While Airness has only had a handful of productions, Marcantel’s play got nominated anonymously for the Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award from its debut production at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival for New American Plays. It has taken off from there and now this production is the Arizona regional premiere.

“It’s nice that there’s no precedence for it,” Michelle Chin said. “We really get to create and interpret on our own what we think all of this is. We know that the audience is not coming in and expecting a certain vision of it. We have all been able to put our mark on it but at the same time, it is hard because we have to make the storytelling clear. We want to pull the audience in and have them latch onto these characters.”

The play will begin with an air guitar performance to let audiences know what they are in for. Chin and the cast learned how to perform air guitar from a musician at the Phoenix Theatre Company who plays in the pit, Jason Brown. By practicing the movements on real guitars and then translating those skills to air movements it will make this production both visually and audibly stimulating.

“I hope people will take away lots of different things,” Marcantel responded when asked what she hopes audiences will leave with after seeing Airness. “For me when I watch it, I walk away with that we really are stronger together. We do our best work when we are building each other up not tearing each other down. And that if something brings you joy and makes you feel fulfilled just go for it, in spite of whatever obstacles present themselves.”

“I hope it will encourage people to reexamine their own lives and to find their inner child again,” smiled Chin. “In your daily life remembering what you really loved as a kid and what those little simple things that brought you joy were. Just getting back to the simple joys of childhood.”

CLICK HERE for more information on this production, which runs through March 31st