A dive jam-packed with brilliance
REVIEW | Cast of 49 cogitates in David Cromer’s latest
Think Robert Altman meets Sam Shepard by way of David Lynch, though they’re all on their way to a 21st century version of "Lord of the Flies" — one that appears to be playing itself out in a rotting foreclosed house on some sinister urban side street that might just be where you live.
Yet even that description does not fully conjure the hallucinatory nature of the theatrical experiment called "Cherrywood," a show that is now jamming a cast of 49 into the intimate confines of Mary-Arrchie Theatre’s second-floor attic of a home, and that is revealing, once again, that director David Cromer is the possessor of an eerie black magic.
The work of playwright Kirk Lynn (who devised it for the Austin, Texas-based Rude Mechanicals), "Cherrywood" has been hugely expanded and reimagined in a way that only Cromer (whose "A Streetcar Named Desire" is now wowing audiences at Glencoe’s Writers’ Theatre) would ever dare attempt.
Part rant, part requiem, it is a disturbing fantasia about the late-adolescent-through-early-twentysomething generation now moving through high school and college, and into a world of unemployment, shrinking dreams, moral disillusionment, psycho-sexual dislocation, ecological meltdown and spiritual confusion.
Wittily subtitled "The Modern Comparable," it feels like a contemporary variation on the work of the Living Theater of the 1960s, with Mary-Arrchie artistic director Richard Cotovsky as the grizzled and bloodied survivor of that time. All around him are the equivalent revolutionary cries, and the personal anguish, wretched excess, half-drugged ques- tioning, nonsense and profundity, tragicomic posturing and fear and loathing of that earlier, upheaval-filled (if more affluent) era.
Part college kegger from hell, part scatological rave and mystical chant, it is sophomoric in its philosophy and end-of-the-world in its mass psychology nightmares. A "Spring Awakening" for the age of Internet dissociation, "Cherrywood" pulls you in with its sense of raw alienation and organic communalism.
It is all but impossible to imagine the nightmare logistics involved in staging and performing this 90-minute show. But the ensemble (which matches the size of the audience) lives and breathes as one during this chilling squatters’ house party. And as the actors move from dumpster-decorated bathroom to living room (cheers for set designer Andre LaSalle), they capture the whole cross-section of wasted and thoughtful kids, wild ones and timid ones, tormentors, survivors and victims. The sane and the mad are all dancing on the edge of oblivion. Or, if you believe the transcendental pizza delivery man, on the brink of possible salvation.
This is a show that is sure to have a cult following as it sings its twisted anthem for the new cannibals. Or perhaps we are just watching the latest "lost generation."
