Theatre in Review: Specky Clark (Irish Arts Center) If you're still in a Halloween mood, consider Specky Clark, a macabre theatre/dance piece, written, choreographed, and directed by Oona Doherty. It's more an anecdote than a fully worked-out story, equally inflected with horror and whimsy, and I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. The title character is a young Glasgow boy sent to Belfast following the event that leaves him an orphan. In the grisly opening sequence, he stares in terror at his mother's corpse on the kitchen floor, a moment made especially grim by ear-splitting music and a chorus of dancing demons. It's a deeply unsettling tableau, and I'm not certain anything that follows quite lives up to it. In any case, this is childhood portrayed at its least idyllic and most treacherous, a fact underlined by Zoe Lecorgne, who, in the title role, expresses her shock and grief in deeply unsettling fits of trembling; it's like watching a person's nervous system implode, and it leaves one squirming yet unwilling to look away. (Several roles, including Specky, are double-cast, so you might see Erin O'Reilly instead. But given her energy and commitment to her character's darkest corners, Lecorgne gives one of the most remarkable performances I've seen in months.) The boy endures a lonely passage to Ireland, where he is taken in by Hinge and Bracket Clark, weird sisters, wrapped in headscarves and hair rollers, puffing away industrially on cigarettes, looking like cartoons who broke out of their panels. They give him his name -- for the spectacles he wears -- and subject him to their idea of loving care, which involves twirling him around like an acrobat and pantsing him. They also get Specky a job in an abattoir where, as an initiation, he must shoot a pig. This act will have unintended consequences when Specky returns to the meat plant that evening, dressed as a skeleton for Samhain, the Gaelic seasonal festival that is more or less the equivalent of Halloween. There he encounters Padraig, the pig, back from the grave, plus a cohort of creatures from the underworld, engaging in a lengthy choreographed sequence that includes dervish-like whirling, a ring-around-the-rosy session, and classic Irish dance moves. By any definition, Specky Clark is an odd one, a hybrid that strikes a hypnotic mood before abruptly coming to a halt. Your correspondent is not an experienced dance critic, although it seems obvious that the moves, drawn from a variety of influences, are precisely executed by Doherty's company. Certainly, the piece's evocation of a child's horrors is as nightmarish as anything you'll find in a Blumhouse thriller, and its cockeyed sense of humor complements, rather than distracts from, the overall eerie mood. What is Doherty getting at? I can't say. Was I bored? Not for a second. Does Specky Clark stick in my mind? You betcha. The set design, by Sabine Dargent, assisted by Caroline Menassol, is most noticeable for a gag, facilitated by a Kabuki curtain, that reveals the abattoir in its full dimension; I assume the designers are also behind Padraig's inventive, birth-like appearance in human form. (Gerard Headley is a most affable ambassador from the porcine world, making Padraig's hold over Specky easy to understand.) John Gunning's lighting design features some stunning beam compositions, but it suffers a bit from darkness; at times the performers' faces are too obscured. Most of the dialogue is delivered via the sound system, and it is all happily intelligible, thanks to Maxime Jerry Fraisse's sound design. (A set of surtitles is helpful.) Fraisse also supplies plenty of sound effects -- the shooting of Padraig is a real shocker -- and original music from various composers, some of it sounding like folk tunes weaponized for terror, plus selections from the Northern Irish musician David Holmes. The costumes, credited to half of Belfast, are varied and amusingly over the top. After the final blackout, one wonders about the implications of Specky's dancing with the dead. Seeing this piece was a strange experience; even as I was gripped, I had the feeling that its real import was flying over my head. As I have noted before, you can expect the unexpected at the Irish Arts Center. If you see Specky Clark, it will certainly give you something to talk about long into the night --David Barbour 
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