Review: 'He Brought Her Heart Back,' Adrienne Kennedy's Beautiful Nightmare
They are at their exquisite peak, this boy and girl stepping through
the shadows. They are far enough from childhood to be fully formed but
not yet coarsened by adulthood, as delicate of limb and feature as
mantelpiece figurines. Only the slight differences in the shades of
their perfect skins suggest they are not a matched set.
play
Tom Pecinka and Juliana Canfield during a performance of "He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box" at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in New York, Jan. 17, 2018. Adrienne Kennedy’s “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” is her first new work in nearly a decade.
(Emon Hassan/The New York Times)
If you’re thinking that anyone this fine and fragile is destined to be shattered, you are right. You need only listen to what they’re saying, in hypnotic Southern accents, to realize that whatever exists between them, it doesn’t have a chance of survival in the early 1940s.
Such
is the world that is conjured so unsettlingly in Adrienne Kennedy’s “He
Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” her first new work in nearly a
decade, which opened Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in
Brooklyn. Because it has been created by Kennedy, this landscape is as
ugly as it is beautiful, its filigree shaped from barbed wire.
Since
she first baffled and electrified New York audiences in the early 1960s
with “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” a guided tour of one writer’s enduring
nightmare, Kennedy has been cultivating her own fertile plot in the
crowded field of memory plays. Only Tennessee Williams, an early
influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody
and disgust.
Like Williams’ characters,
those who inhabit Kennedy’s plays are both products of, and misfits in, a
circumscribed society. Unlike the typical Williams protagonist,
Kennedy’s leading ladies (as they tend to be) are African-American. Not
that any label, ethnic or otherwise, comes close to pinning down
identities that are always, dangerously, in flux.
Works
like her “Funnyhouse,” “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White”
and “June and Jean in Concert” seem to take place inside their creator’s
mind, at the point where conscious anxiety bleeds into troubling
dreams. “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” which has been
directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis for Theater for a New
Audience, offers a historical, wider-lens view of the same terrain.
Occupying a mere 45 minutes of stage time (Kennedy’s favorite dramatic
form is the short fugue), it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend
through generations of conflict.
This is
not to suggest that Kennedy, at 86, has made new concessions to
narrative conventions or expository clarity. True, a bare description of
her latest subject — a romance between a girl of mixed-race and the
white scion of the family that rules the town in Georgia where they live
— brings to mind a century’s worth of purplish novels about forbidden
love.
Kennedy is susceptible to the pulpy
appeal of such fare and equally contemptuous of it. And as the play’s
two characters, Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Chris (Tom Pecinka), tell
their respective, overlapping stories, they seem steeped in a
sentimental twilight.
Yet often what they
say is unyieldingly hard, or else feverish and fragmentary in the way
of half-remembered nightmares. In detailed descriptions delivered with
perfect, paradoxically languid urgency by Canfield and Pecinka, they map
the town where they grew up. We learn about its best houses, its
streets, its schools and the racially divided town plan, devised by
Chris’ father.
We also hear accounts,
firsthand and distortingly recycled, of their family histories. And
while Chris’ is cushioned in an affluence that Kay has never known, they
both carry a legacy of racially mixed sexual relationships.
Kay’s
father was white, and her mother, who is black, died not long after
giving birth to her at 15 — possibly a suicide, possibly a murder
victim. Chris’ father, Harrison Aherne, is both an architect of
segregation and a man with black mistresses, by whom he has had several
children. He has lovingly overseen the creation of the graveyard in
which these women and their families can be buried.
Kay
and Chris grew up watching each other from a fascinated distance. The
play follows their tentative courtship, from the eve of Chris’ departure
to New York City (he hopes to become an actor) to the moment of
America’s entry into World War II. Human and historic events turn out to
be intertwined in unexpected ways.
It is
important to note that while “Box” is a two-character play (three, if
you count Chris’ father, who is represented onstage by a cadaverous
dummy), it is not really a dialogue. As Chris and Kay relate the facts
and myths of their genealogies, it seems as if they are not connecting
through shared history but pushing themselves into ever greater
isolation.
As in most of Kennedy’s work,
the narrative is delivered in a kaleidoscope of shards. These take the
form of letters, recollections of conflicting tales told by family
members, itemized descriptions of a train station, a savage moment from
the Brothers Grimm (which gives the play its title), wistful period
songs and lines from two very different shows — Noël Coward’s operetta
“Bitter Sweet” and Christopher Marlowe’s lurid revenge tragedy “The
Massacre at Paris.”
Only Kennedy,
perhaps, could gracefully balance such disparate works as mood-defining
reference points of equal weight. And while the implicit connections
between Chris’ father and Nazi Germany might feel overly contrived in a
more traditional play, here they become natural echoes in a nightmare
that enwraps the whole world.
The
physical production may be the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy
dreamscape has ever been given, starting with Christopher Barreca’s
weathered wooden set, a synecdoche for the miniature model of the town
the audience passes on the way to its seats.
Donald
Holder’s lighting both anchors this place with projected words and
blueprints (Austin Switser is the video designer) and sets it swirling
into giddy decomposition. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes and Justin
Ellington’s subliminal music and sound design match and extend the same
sensibility.
The stage, by the way, is
divided by a long staircase. It looks both solid and spectral, daunting
in the way a child might perceive a steep flight of steps. It whispers
of both the fantasy of escape and the reality of captivity.
Even
in stark retrospect, these conflicting elements do not rule out each
other. In setting up camp in their intersection, Kennedy remains one the
harshest — and most invaluable — of the American theater’s conflicted
sentimentalists.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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