Quite exceptional - best thing I've seen in a while.
A youngish Brooklyn couple - Elias and Jenny - check into a somehow forebodingly kitschy bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, where they're greeted by an owner, Mertis, whose chipper demeanour can't help but (at least in the context) cause the audience to wonder what secrets she or the house are harbouring and later meet Mertis's friend Genevieve who, blind and oracular, seems almost to have stepped out of a Beckett play; Genevieve's pronouncements during the play's second act (there are two intervals over its more than three hour running time) seem like embodied statements made by the world itself, and still more so when she breaks the fourth wall when house lights come up for the second interval and directly addresses the audience about the time, years previously, when she went mad.
One of the play's most impressive features is the way that it's so clearly 'about' a number of things - most notably, hauntings and ghosts of many kinds - and yet never obvious or at all over-determined. This plays out particularly keenly in the many parallels that are set up between Jenny and Genevieve, leading us to speculate that - on some however level - the latter is an older version of the former (the similarities of their names, the way that both describe experiences of feeling transcendently at the centre of the world, their common tendencies to ascribe spiritual relevance or even agency to objects, the way that it seems just possible that Genevieve could have been the one who gave the doll Samantha - from Jenny's childhood - to Mertis so that it could end up hauntingly surveying the scene from its shelf in the b&b/stage set, the common (ha, ha) name of 'John' across their stories) without resolving or really more than suggestively hinting at the possibility or what it might mean. (Also - is that Lovecraft that Mertis reads to Genevieve as her 'weekly reading'?!)
It's very good on each of the levels at which it operates, not least in the relationships between the various characters and between each of them and their pasts and off-stage others. And its subtlety neither obscures nor falsely betokens a depth that will, I think, make it linger.
(w/ Laura F and Meribah)
A youngish Brooklyn couple - Elias and Jenny - check into a somehow forebodingly kitschy bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, where they're greeted by an owner, Mertis, whose chipper demeanour can't help but (at least in the context) cause the audience to wonder what secrets she or the house are harbouring and later meet Mertis's friend Genevieve who, blind and oracular, seems almost to have stepped out of a Beckett play; Genevieve's pronouncements during the play's second act (there are two intervals over its more than three hour running time) seem like embodied statements made by the world itself, and still more so when she breaks the fourth wall when house lights come up for the second interval and directly addresses the audience about the time, years previously, when she went mad.
One of the play's most impressive features is the way that it's so clearly 'about' a number of things - most notably, hauntings and ghosts of many kinds - and yet never obvious or at all over-determined. This plays out particularly keenly in the many parallels that are set up between Jenny and Genevieve, leading us to speculate that - on some however level - the latter is an older version of the former (the similarities of their names, the way that both describe experiences of feeling transcendently at the centre of the world, their common tendencies to ascribe spiritual relevance or even agency to objects, the way that it seems just possible that Genevieve could have been the one who gave the doll Samantha - from Jenny's childhood - to Mertis so that it could end up hauntingly surveying the scene from its shelf in the b&b/stage set, the common (ha, ha) name of 'John' across their stories) without resolving or really more than suggestively hinting at the possibility or what it might mean. (Also - is that Lovecraft that Mertis reads to Genevieve as her 'weekly reading'?!)
It's very good on each of the levels at which it operates, not least in the relationships between the various characters and between each of them and their pasts and off-stage others. And its subtlety neither obscures nor falsely betokens a depth that will, I think, make it linger.
(w/ Laura F and Meribah)
