Theatre in Review: The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire (The Civilians/Vineyard Theatre)

	Bobby Moreno, Bartley Booz, Cricket Brown, Donetta Lavinia Grays, Jeff Biehl, Bruce McKenzie. Photo: Carol Rosegg

If you believe the above title is awkward, wait until you see the play. Anne Washburn, who often works by indirection, has imagined the members of a farm collective living somewhere in California. Their reasons are mysterious: The play's time frame is, apparently, now, yet their attitudes and manner of dressing often scream 1969. They aren't a WACO-style cult, nor do they appear to be connected to any religion, whether organized or non-denominational. Yet talk a great deal about grace and preface each meal with an elaborate ceremonial pronunciation of the word "amen." As an example of their vague beliefs, at prayer time, one of them, Simon, intones, "To you, for whom we have not found an adequate name; you, who we struggle to see through the bad strange perversions of worship we were forced into by our parents, many of whom in their desperate weak way genuinely loved us; by society, which pretended to love us but most assuredly did not; these are the bad mists we struggle through to find you. We know you are the mists, as well as the struggle we know we struggle to know."

Nor are they a gun-toting, ultra-libertarian back-to-the-land group in the Ammon Bundy mode, even though Thomas, the de-facto leader, refers to the pain of knowing, "I'm subject to a federal government whose hegemony over this good earth I do not recognize and whose laws I find generally offensive...I know there is on some level no escape from this kind of invisible legal societal netting without an army and a vast liberation, but I believe that being harder to break means something." Such messages make the collective's mission, its reason for being, devilishly hard to make out.

Even harder to discern is who these people are. Even the most voluble of them has no discernible background or strong character traits. Mari, a young woman, drops a few hints, in a thoroughly detached way, about her private life. We also hear from Milo, who, as an adult, looks back at his childhood on the farm; as a boy, he was raped by Paul, another communard, in his twenties. Once mentioned, however, the incident is dropped, and, since Paul is a cipher, the incident is easily forgotten. The dramatis personae includes eight children (played by the adult actors), but they come and go at the playwright's whim. They never appear at the communal meals, for obvious reasons. It's impossible to tell who they belong to, a fact that probably doesn't matter because none of the adults seem to have exclusively intimate relationships; passion of any kind has seemingly been banned.

In her delightful backstage comedy-drama Ten out of Twelve, Washburn used the technical rehearsal of a play to reveal everything about its participants; in the less successful but highly distinctive Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, she charted, without being too explicit about it, the decay of civilization following a definitive social breakdown, its survivors clinging to old episodes of The Simpsons, handed down through the generations, as a talisman of a lost world. Here, she offers no clues, preferring to strip away anything that might make her characters sympathetic, urgent, or recognizably human. They discuss every situation, including sexual liaisons, cremation, and the criminal cover-up of an apparent suicide, with the dispassion of graduate students in a seminar on Immanuel Kant.

The cremation issue has to do with Peter, who, for reasons of his own, committed suicide. Rather than return his body to his estranged family -- of course, they haven't reported his death -- they chose to incinerate it, although they do a bad job of it. (Simon notes, "We'll bury him now but...very deeply. There's meat on him still, and he will attract...the appetite of many.") But if you think this cover-up is going to generate any drama, suspense, or character revelation, you are in the wrong theatre. Near the end of the first act, Will, Peter's brother, shows up with news of a legacy (the family is enormously wealthy), which leads to some creative lying but no discernible increase in the dramatic stakes.

Indeed, the play wanders down various tangents. The company often appears as a Greek chorus, enumerating animals or objects ("The green cough, the firm couch, the saggy couch/Muddy boots on the porch/Coffee cups in the sink.") Pages and pages of dialogue are expended on whether to kill Lula, a pig, for food (meat is at a premium in these cash-strapped circumstances), and whether to also slaughter Lula's piglets, since the children are convinced that one of them -- but which one? -- is the reincarnation of Peter. A shockingly substantial chunk of the second is devoted to the production of an unfinished play by Peter. The community is basically living a subsistence existence off the grid, and the only telephone is locked up in a gerbil cage, but they have access to an electronic keyboard, detailed costumes, microphones, imaginative scenic effects, and enormous, professional-grade puppets. We don't get to see a planned levitation effect. "We're still figuring out the winch system," says Simon.

This sequence is followed by a final twist so baffling that I'm still sorting it out. Is it an unseen part of the play-within-the-play? Some kind of alternate ending? Is everyone onstage an unreliable narrator? Or does Washburn deliberately intend to make a hash of her plot?

To the extent that he can do anything with these gnomic proceedings, director Steve Cosson gets solid, committed performances from, among others, Jeff Biehl as Simon, Donnetta Lavinia Grays as Donna (who is jittery about Peter's death being found out), Bruce McKenzie as Thomas, Tom Pecinka as Will and Peter, and Marianne Rendon, as Mari. The most interesting passages are given to Bobby Moreno as Milo, who somehow -- we never learn the details -- makes it to Harvard and a very different adult life.

The action is well-grounded in its production design, especially Andrew Boyce's farmhouse interior, its drab walls occasionally enlivened with children's drawings; the top of the upstage walls suggests the mountains in the distance. Amith Chandrashaker's lighting and Ryan Gamblin's sound design are both solid contributions. If Emily Rebholz's costumes go way over the top for Peter's play, I assume she was doing Cosson's bidding. (The same is probably true of the attention-getting puppets by Monkey Boys Productions.) Tommy Kurzman's wig and hair designs are hugely helpful, since the actors play multiple roles.

In her plays, Washburn often doles out only so much information about her characters, gambling that we will infer much more about them. When this methodology works, it can pay enormous dividends; when it goes awry, she appears to be largely speaking to herself. To see The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire is to be lost in a world of private meaning; in the script, Washburn writes, "Not a moment of this should be played for satire." She certainly gets her wish here. "Give everyone full credit," she adds. I fear the audience isn't included in that. --David Barbour