Presented by ArtsEmerson
Composed, Written, & Performed by: Ahamefule J. Oluo 
Produced by Roya Amirsoleymani
Lighting Design Lily McLeodmed by Ahamefule J. Oluo

Robert J. Orchard Stage
Emerson Paramount Center
559 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111
February 20-22, 2026

Runtime: 90 minutes, no intermission

Article by Diana Lu

BOSTON – There are theater experiences that entertain you for a couple of hours and then fade pleasantly into memory. And then there are performances that quietly rearrange your understanding of what art can do, what intimacy means. 

The Things Around Us, written and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo, accomplishes something rare in contemporary solo performance. It creates profound intimacy without confession. The connection between artist and audience forged over the course of the evening does not arise from autobiographical revelation or narrative excavation, but from structure itself. 

This expansion of form is what makes the show singularly profound. Many one-person shows rely on emotional disclosure. They build toward catharsis through story: trauma revealed, growth articulated, arc completed. The Things Around Us steps beyond this model and explores more possibilities of connection and vulnerability. 

The anecdotes Oluo shares are emotionally resonant and vividly evocative, but they are largely not about him, nor do they connect into a larger narrative with a satisfying conclusion. They remain observational, fragmentary, associative. For audiences who crave deep excavation, myself included, this can initially feel like withholding.

But the withholding is deliberate. The show operates in a distinctly Expressionist mode. Like literary modernists such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, Oluo externalizes consciousness rather than constructing a plot. We do not leave knowing his history. We leave knowing the architecture of his mind. The fragmentation is Oluo’s intentional rendering of perception as it occurs for him: layered, nonlinear, unresolved and continuing.

This is a kind of vulnerability that takes enormous skill and courage to translate into art. It is the kind of closeness that usually comes from knowing someone intimately, by observing their unmasked, unguarded habits, cadences, and mental patterns. For the price of a theater ticket, he gives us what usually takes years of deep trust to earn.

Oluo’s musical and comedic skills are equally astonishing. With no opening act and no alcohol to warm the audience, he had the room laughing within two lines. This was a feat made even more impressive by the solemn land acknowledgment immediately preceding his entrance. Each successive musical interlude built upon the last, with increasing harmonic dissonance, rhythmic complexity, and layers of instrumentation that resolved in a final live-loop session of triumphant release. The music created the emotional and dramatic arc for the show that the words did not.

Thematically, the show touches on coping during the pandemic, channeling the rawness and intensity of the era in ways reminiscent of Bo Burnham: Inside. It also evokes ideas about awe, wonder, and paradox explored by Brene Brown—that these can be a stabilizing force in times of uncertainty and emotional pain.

In the end, my preference is still for art with deep excavation and narrative closure. That said, I am subtly yet profoundly shifted by The Things Around Us. Oluo shows that closeness does not require confession, that vulnerability can be captured in structure and process, not just story. The show expanded my sense of what is possible between artist and audience. I learned a new way to be human, together.

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