My First Theatre "WOW"

Years of learning about theatre and being taught to analyze everything have made me a sour theatre-goer. I criticize everything because I have been trained to do so. I can enjoy parts of a show, but rarely is there a time when I can sit back and say I loved a performance...except for last night.

We went to go see Pilgrims of the Night last night at Project Cube. It was part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. The show was, without exception, entertaining, funny, and touching. Hilarious and thoughtful. Excellent. The venue was small and the stage was cluttered, but I adored it. It even had a zombie dance...beyond words, really.

The show itself is a modernized version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. All of the actors were talented and engaging. We were sitting so close to the stage (practically in the playing space) and I was touched by not one, but two of the actors. There was an empty seat next to me, and one actor sat next to me and nudged me as he winked. Then, later, another sat next to me and patted my leg. It was surreal and hilarious. Lots of breaking the fourth wall.

Nora and I were so excited about the show that we had a little senior project talk going, but we'll see. Luckily, the play is available, in a volume called Plays by Len Jenkin (just in case anybody needs an idea of what to get me for Christmas...)

Interestingly, the playwright, Len Jenkin, also adapted Ramona Quimby for First Stage in Milwaukee, the same version (I think) which was performed at Zona Gale in Portage a few years ago. So he does children's plays too - a playwright after my own heart!

Here is a summary of the show for those who are interested:

Something mysterious but probably horrible—possibly life-threatening—has happened. Bright flashes of light blaze in the night sky; on the ground there seem to be fires, and in the air there seem to be flying saucers.

The good news is that all of that has happened on the other side of the river. On this shore, six weary, disparate travelers converge. It's very late, and they've missed the last ferry. Given the remoteness of this way station and the uncertainty of recent events, they decide to camp out here for the night. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories.

Thus begins Len Jenkin's lovely, timely play Pilgrims of the Night. In short order Jenkin introduces us to an eccentric cross-section of humanity: a former lost soul on the path toward redemption named Mr. Samuel Sundown; a savvy urban business executive type, Lily Black; a slick, even slippery shyster with the moniker Ray T. Fox; the wife of the ferry's captain, an enigmatic woman called Viva; and the flim-flamming Professor Hubert and his street-wise, somewhat troubled niece/assistant, Zoe. Watching over them all is Poor Tom, the lonely but omniscient ex-con who runs the station and narrates the play.

The stories these six tell each other (and us) feel, at first, like the campfire ghost variety: Ray's "Story of Nick Slick, Darlene, Rudy, and George the Cook" is a bawdy tale of a cuckolded husband; Lily's "At the Zombie Jamboree" fancifully places her supposed roommate Sherry in an empire of zombies masterminded by a fabulously wealthy sugar plantation owner; and Samuel's "Dr. Kremser, Vivisectionist" is a Twilight Zone-y narrative about a mad scientist and his possibly madder assistant. Speaking to our basic fears, the spooky stories are oddly comforting and entertaining, little semaphores of defiance to ward off the uncertainty across the water.

In the second half, the stories turn unexpectedly profound. "Olga the Headless Woman," Viva's contribution, is about a charlatan's exploitation of a sad, slow young woman who is, of course, not really headless. "The Story of Elmo March," narrated by Zoe, is a sweet-natured parable about an ordinary Joe who is enlisted by a silver fairy to spread the truth throughout the world—truth that no one will believe. And Hubert's final offering, "The Adventures of Bunny and Dick," is a creation allegory about an unlikely couple who set out to found a Utopia and end up becoming Adam and Eve.

The stories, brought to life with great charm and spirit by six actors in addition to the narrators, don't finally converge in a single spot; this troubled my companion at the show, who, seeing some of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in this play, wanted some thematic closure. For me, Pilgrims of the Night is wholly successful, however, a celebration of the restorative power of storytelling, especially on dark, stormy, scary nights when other resources seem to fail us.