Lying motionless inside a CT scanner searching for signs of cancer, Shana Carroll’s brain began to fidget.
“I’ve had so many procedures where you’re inside machines, and you just feel like: What science fiction weird thing is going on here?” said Carroll, a writer, director and choreographer.
What if, the former trapeze artist thought, a show could be fashioned, knitted together, from the moments in life when a person is lying flat and looking up at the world?
And so, in the cold sterility of that hospital room about two years ago, the idea for “The Attic: Things I’ve Seen While Lying on My Back” was born. The show is now playing at The Goodman Theater.
What the audience witnesses in Carroll’s show is memoir set free from its binding in a mesmerizing display of acrobatic dance, music and stage projections. Bodies — belonging to the Montreal-based circus-theater collective The 7 Fingers, which Carroll co-founded — twirl, leap, fly and occasionally writhe across the stage. Carroll chose French composer Erik Satie’s haunting piano piece Gnossienne No. 1 as a recurring theme, long a favorite of hers and music that feels like someone tiptoeing around the edge of a great sadness.
“It was a [piece] I listened to a lot in my attic, so I wanted it to be a touchstone through the show,” Carroll said.
Carroll, who has active metastatic breast cancer, said she hoped the very personal would reveal the universal.
“I can tell stories about my life, but what you want is that it’s actually connecting people to certain themes or understandings or realizations or just connecting to humanity in general in a lifetime,” Carroll said.
Carroll, a self-described theater kid who grew up in Berkeley, Calif., attended Montreal’s National Circus School, launching a 20-year acrobatic career. She’s been a Cirque du Soleil soloist and has been nominated for a Tony award for her choreography and circus design on “Water for Elephants,” the 2024 Broadway musical based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 best-selling novel of the same name.
As someone who spent decades in the circus, Carroll has led a life worthy of memoir, but she said she consciously avoided weaving in the more sensational moments from her past.
Her father, Jon Carroll, was a writer and editor who moved the family from the West Coast to Chicago for a stint so he could work for Hugh Hefner. “I spent the night at the Playboy mansion when I was 2 years old,” she said.
So, instead of one-of-a-kind, oddball experiences, we watch Tyler Meredith, the veteran Chicago actress playing Carroll, narrate from beneath the beams of her childhood attic, the place of the show’s title. We see her marvel at dust motes glittering in the air, the awkwardness of a middle-school dance. We see her giving birth, even considering her own death.
Her experiences are amplified through nine acrobats’ extraordinary feats of grace, physical strength and dexterity: three-story human towers on the move, bodies flung in the air and (seemingly) effortlessly caught. In one sequence that made the audience gasp, acrobat Melvin Diggs plummets head-first down a 20-foot steel pole, stopping inches from the stage floor.
One of the show’s most innovative and memorable scenes is toward the end, when Carroll’s character is in a hospital bed that gently rises from the horizontal to the vertical. Hands poke through the mattress from below, grabbing at Meredith’s writhing body. It’s less B-movie horror than a clever way to illustrate her ambivalence toward hospitals.
“When you’re alone in a hospital bed, it both feels like they won’t stop fussing with me — and the creepiness of it — but it also feels like you have accompaniment and comfort even though you’re so alone,” Carroll said.
In the show, the bed then swings, trapeze-like, high above the stage with Meredith lying still on it.
Though Carroll now directs others to fly through the air, she said she is able to use the lessons of a life on the trapeze in her cancer battle.
“There is a lot of pain,” she said. “You burn your skin. You get bruises everywhere.”
And there are similarities between the fear she faced during every performance and the fear of confronting her mortality.
“With cancer, you don’t choose it, but it feels familiar: ‘Oh, I’ve been here, I know how to navigate fear,’ ” she said. “You feel like you’ve confronted death before.”