Apparitions & expletives 'Our Lady of 121st Street' & 'Vincent in Brixton'
Wren, Celia
STAGE Celia Wren APPARITIONS & EXPLETIVES 'Our Lady' & 'Vincent in Brixton' Hhe Lord's Prayer crops up in few contemporary plays -the meager oeuvre of thirty-eight-year-old Stephen Adly Guirgis,...
...Scenes halt abruptly, in mid-sentiment, with a cut-away brusqueness more typical of film and television than theater...
...STAGE Celia Wren APPARITIONS & EXPLETIVES 'Our Lady' & 'Vincent in Brixton' Hhe Lord's Prayer crops up in few contemporary plays -the meager oeuvre of thirty-eight-year-old Stephen Adly Guirgis, apparently, being an exception...
...Stuck in a whale...
...Further uptown, Broadway is hosting Nicholas Wright's Vincent in Brixton, recently imported from Britain, where it won the 2003 Olivier Award for best play...
...Aware as one is of van Gogh's eventual suicide, it is impossible not to read this contrast as a metaphor for a spiritual condition: Isn't it the sense of a looming void, of the shelterlessness of everyday existence, that gives serious depression its bite...
...Vincent in Brixton fleshes out this skeletal evidence with an elegiac love story between the twenty-year-old Dutchman and the middle-aged widow,, who, Wright hypothesizes, encouraged her tenant to develop his talents as an artist-even after he abandoned the muse in order to teach in a religious school...
...But the comfortable clutter-sink, stove, cabinets, table-glowingly lit by lighting designer Peter Mum-ford, only extends upward for about ten feet...
...That's as honest as I can be...
...Before finding his true niche as a maestro of swirly brush strokes, it turns out, van Gogh labored as a low-ranking employee in an international art-dealing firm that briefly posted him to London in the 1870s...
...Guirgis has given the piece a fitful shape that mirrors the unfulfilled, untidy existence of his characters...
...Characters surface, swear, refer enigmatically to their lives, and disappear, without ever demonstrating-at least in a traditional way-how their presence is integral to the scenario...
...I've lived in sorrow...
...Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, the writer's touching, expletive-ridden prison drama, first produced in 2000, kicks off with a scene in which a first-time convict drives himself to near desperation trying to recall the once-known wording...
...Despair, Father Lux informs the African-American talkshow host Rooftop (Ron Cephas Jones), may be compared to the state of a man stuck in a well...
...responds Rooftop, who vaguely remembers learning about Jonah from Sister Rose...
...Though it brushes past a few near-miss romances, the storyline arrives at no resolutions, and the play's only epiphanies are quietly desperate moments of truth telling...
...Hur Lady of 121st Street isn't the only current New York production channeling the religious impulse...
...The hesitating romance that develops between the widow and the callow van Gogh (Jochum ten Haaf) is one of the elements lending the play an aching sadness...
...Mounted by New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company, a band of artists that includes Guirgis, the comedy fared so well when it premiered off-off-Broadway in 2002 that it recently reopened at a larger Manhattan theater to considerable press fanfare-including a laudatory New York Times magazine piece that identified the playwright as a "lost Catholic...in spiritual crisis...
...Over the course of two largely plotless acts, the play's seedy, psychically damaged characters-Latino, white, and African-American, mostly former Catholic school students of the late Sister Rose-dredge up old friendships, gripe, recriminate, and curse...
...I tried to keep bio win till my soul came up-just to see if I still had one, but nothing came up, Father- nothing came up, Father-nothin-just air...
...In part, this success and media attention reflect the involvement of film and theater star Philip Seymour Hoffman (Punch-Drunk Love, The Talented Mr...
...In Vincent in Brixton, the artist compares his first inklings of depression to the reaction of the rich young man in Matthew 19, told by Jesus to sell his goods...
...It's black and it's bright, just like you said...
...Howard be thy name...
...In the context of Mumford's set, with its towering void pressing down on the Loyer kitchen, the sentiment van Gogh describes does not seem too removed from the anguish Guirgis's characters experience in Our Lady of 121st Street...
...Clare Higgins, who landed the Best Actress Olivier, among other awards, for her performance as Ursula in Britain, has reprised the role in the New York staging, which is presented by Lincoln Center Theater...
...It never leaves me now...
...Howard...
...Guirgis again deploys the Our Father in a pivotal scene in his newest work, Our Lady of 121st Street, an edgy, often hilarious comedy about a group of frazzled thirty-somethings gathered at a Harlem funeral home for the wake of an alcoholic nun...
...All the action takes place in the Loyer household's kitchen, which designer Tim Hatley has turned into the kind of room a nineteenth-century Williams Sonoma might have used for a catalog shoot...
...As Wright explains in a foreword to the British edition of his play, van Gogh is known to have lodged in the house of a widow, Ursula Loyer, and probably attended a nearby Congregational church...
...because he chose for his medium, flesh...
...His cynical humor molds the action in Our Lady, whose first scene opens with a detective (Felix Solis)- interrogating a ranting, inexplicably trouser-less mourner (Richard Petrocelli) about the disappearance of Sister Rose's corpse...
...How art?-How?-How-now...
...We all know what happened to van Gogh's ear and, after that, to the rest of van Gogh-and this knowledge makes a poignant complement to the very cozy, domestic scenery and stage business in this production, which is directed by Richard Eyre...
...Jesus, van Gogh explains in the play, "was the greatest artist of all time...
...Say, you remember them pajamas wit the feet on them...
...Our Lady threatens to be the breakout work for Guirgis, who until recently has numbered among the innumerable occasionally produced dramatists toiling on the far fringes of American culture...
...He went away-and this is the beautiful word that it says in your English Bible-'sorrowful,'" Vincent says to Ursula, who is also a victim of depression...
...In this beautifully understated study of love and depression, Wright-whose works have been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre-speculates about a little-known chapter in the early life of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90...
...And after half of Sister Rose's body has been found in a suitcase off the West Side Highway, without rounding out its narrative and themes, the play just...stops...
...Religion might perhaps have rooted them-one can deduce this from their nostalgic anecdotes about Sister Rose-but as it is they are restless, cranky, and anxious, missing a vital element of communitas in modern urban America...
...The slyly choreographed non sequiturs of this conversation accord with the deliberate jaggedness of Our Lady's form...
...For these characters, religion cannot fill the emptiness-or, if it can, it hasn't done so yet...
...And Guirgis's ear is equally tuned to the absurdities of vernacular speech- especially the kind that should not be printed in a family magazine-and of human thought-patterns...
...There is also the appeal of Guirgis's wickedly deadpan sense of humor, a trait that tempers his bleakly antiromantic worldview...
...For despite the romance, and despite the premonitions of great art in the making, Vincent in Brixton ultimately emphasizes missed human connections and existential pain...
...After seeing his ex-wife, Rooftop tells Father Lux, "I vomited everything I had inside me onto the sidewalk-and I mean every thing...
...Shortly after coaxing a gay lawyer and a foul-mouthed radio talk show host through the aforementioned Lord's Prayer, for example, Father Lux, a legless Korean War veteran, admits, "Most of the time, I don't believe in God at all, and when I do- I'm furious at him...
...Above that, a deep black emptiness reaches to the flies...
...I usta go home and have nightmares bout getting stuck up inside a whale-my pop's usta beat my ass wit a slipper talkin bout, 'Ain't no whales in Harlem, fool, go back ta sleep, this is a workin family...
...Ripley), who directs the adequately acted, no-frills production...
...Our Father who art in Heaven, how- how-how-howel-ed, howled, howling, howl, howl, Thurston Howell, fucking, fuckin, SHIT...
...Fuck...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
