Bughouse ★★

By The Recs RDC - Randall David Cook 1 month ago

‘Bughouse’ is an intriguing concept still searching for dramatic purpose.

Bughouse, the rather unusual new show at Vineyard Theatre, examines outsider artist Henry Darger, a reclusive hospital janitor and dishwasher who secretly created (and stored) several hundred watercolor paintings, a 15,000-page novel, a 5,000-page autobiography, hundreds of illustrated books, and even a six-volume weather journal in his two-bedroom Chicago apartment. His prodigious output was only discovered by his landlords after he was moved to a nursing home in 1972. When Darger died in 1973, he posthumously became world-famous. His art is now exhibited in collections in Chicago, Paris, Lausanne (home to a museum specializing in outsider art), and right here in New York; the American Folk Art Museum on the Upper West Side holds the largest collection of Darger’s work. 

Questions quickly arise once you’re seated in the theater, staring at a proscenium. How to dramatize the story of a man who only had one close friend in his adult life, in a relationship that was primarily epistolary? Certainly an unconventional theatrical form makes sense for such an unconventional life, but how do you make that interesting to watch on a stage and make it feel necessary as live theater rather than simply part of an exhibition?

Images by Carol Rosegg

Darger had a miserable Dickensian childhood and, in turn, became obsessed with the mistreatment of children. That background might have fueled this production’s narrative engine, but it’s never fully explored, mentioned only briefly at the top of the show.

What the audience is presented with instead is a series of fragmented anecdotes rather than a coherent dramatic narrative. If you don’t know anything about Darger before the show and don’t carefully read the background information panels that the Vineyard has displayed (upstairs and downstairs, in case you miss them on one level or the other), you might very well be baffled as downtown mainstay John Kelly, who portrays Darger with admirable intensity, rambles and rumbles his way around his cluttered apartment (Faye Armon-Troncoso has impressively outdone herself with all those props).

Even if you’re not baffled, you may well find yourself bored. The production is a portrait rather than a play; there’s no conflict beyond the inner ones Darger mutters about, no sense of urgency, and absolutely zero plot. Aristotle would at least appreciate the elements of décor and spectacle: the images and films projected on the set windows and one of the apartment’s mirrors are engaging, sometimes beautiful, so kudos to production designer John Narun, cinematographer Fred Murphy, and animator Ruth Lingford for giving the audience something to hang onto.

The program notes that Bughouse is adapted from the writings of Darger, and it feels as though conceiver and director Martha Clarke (Garden of Earthly Delights, Vienna: Lusthaus) and playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest) created strict parameters for themselves that ended up strangling their better instincts. Both of these talented women have done far stronger work in the past, and both will do so again in the future. For now, those interested in Henry Darger are better off heading uptown.

You’ll be bugged if stuck in this particular house ★★ 2 stars

Author Profile

The Recs RDC - Randall David Cook
Tags: , ,