Theater review: Vigils

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has a way of focusing on memories as portals into self-discovery. A sudden step on a church flagstone, the way a napkin opens, the taste of a Madeleine, and the narrator’s mind begins reeling with other images, memories, and stories. For Proust’s narrator, involuntary memory ends up being the stuff of life, imbuing it with an artistry of its own. We piece meaning out of the stained-glass windows of our own lives — fragmented, refracted, sometimes beautiful memories.

While lacking the grace of Proust’s language, Noah Haidle’s Vigils (now playing at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary) carries on a similar discourse with memory. As one of Haidle’s characters says, “We’re not in control of what we remember or what we forget.” What memories we stumble upon in life have nothing to do with desire or will. For the same reason, we don’t always remember linearily. As Haidle has it, memory can loop back on itself, catching us in hellish circles of our own mnemonic making.

It’s with this play on memory, under Aaron Ginsburg’s direction, that Kitchen Dog Theater’s season begins. Dwelling on memory, loss, and redemption, the play is a fitting way to mark 9/11 and the coming of autumn. But where KDT’s production succeeds in its introspection, the play itself feels tedious in its repetitions.

A young widow (Tina Parker) still mourns the loss of her husband, who died trying to rescue a baby from a fire two years ago. Because Widow can’t cope with his going, she keeps her husband’s soul locked up in her house. But Widow’s met a Wooer (Jim Kuenzer), and between trying to control her dead husband’s soul and flirting with a new man, she starts to unravel. Meanwhile, Soul (Ira Steck) wants out of there. He’s concerned about his final destination so he keeps reliving his past life to see where he’ll go. Body (Matthew Gray), Soul’s erstwhile living self, performs Soul’s memories for him. Soon, everyone’s all over the place; and the time-space continuum gets increasingly disrupted.

Matthew Gray, especially, sizzles and smokes as Body. Seriously, he’s on fire in this role. Even in his more up close and personal scenes, he manages to avoid the merely vulgar and get at something redeemable. He ennobles every emotion he undertakes to express, giving them honesty and integrity. I grieved for Widow in her loss of such a man as Gray makes Body.

Ira Steck as Soul looks sufficiently ethereal and archangelic in white, his pale skin and platinum hair elongating his upward movement. His agile gymnastics add some excitement to the show. Jim Kuenzer as Wooer is subdued and sympathetic, affably good-mannered, gentlemanly, and reserved.

Tina Parker as Widow slides seamlessly between seductive charm and frenzied hysteria, fastening on both stricken grief and nascent love with equal balance.

Craig Siebel’s set design and Laura McMeley’s lighting design accentuate the earthly and the otherworldly, moving between skylights, stairwells, holes in the wall, wallflowers, and holes in the floor, making the overall effect of the stage seemingly metaphysical.

Yet where strong, often moving, performances mark the show, Vigils itself begins to feel intractably infernal, running out of steam as it tries to decide where to put the end-stop. But the nature of circles is to start over, and if there’s a final ending for Vigils, it’s to launch the expiation of memory for someone else. Where Vigils might be an infelicitous conduit at times, then, it marks a transition from what we involuntarily experience to what we voluntarily accept — a distinction Proust himself would not sniff at.