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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > April > 25 > Entry
Review: ‘The Difficulty of Crossing A Field’
Enigma is layered on enigma in ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,’ the haunting opera cum musical theater work now getting an adventurous production at UT’s B. Iden Payne Theater, deftly directed by Luke Leonard.
Such enigmatic layering extends to the very origins of the piece.
This 75-minute opera by David Lang and Mac Wellman is based on 1888 short story by Ambroise Bierce. In Bierce’s odd tale a wealthy farmer in pre-Civil War Alabama drops from sight one afternoon as he crosses his field. His friends, neighbors, family and slaves have all only glanced away for second. But the plantation owner, Williamson, is gone; so is whatever social and political hierarchy his dominate position held. And because he has no male heir, a court must decide if Williamson is truly gone or not so that his estate can be distributed. The center of a world has suddenly, mysteriously vanished.
Wellman, a convention-defying New York-based playwright, transformed Bierce’s inscrutable yet politically satirical tale into an uncommon play in 1999. Then Lang — the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer whose genre-busting career include founding the new music groundbreaker group Bang On A Can — collaborated with Wellman to create a musical version for the stage which premiered in 2002 and featured the Kronos Quartet.
In Lang and Wellman’s variant — in which arias combine with spoken text — we are presented with several re-tellings of Williamson’s disappearance. A neighbor recants his confused remembrances. Williamson’s wife (a compelling Jennifer Adams) goes mad and takes to the roof, refusing to come down until he returns. Williamson’s daughter (a captivating Haley Hussey) demands to know the “mysteries of Selma, Alabama” — a reference that resonates past the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.
And throughout a chorus of ghostly slaves echo and add to the alternate versions of Williamson’s mysterious disappearance.
“We are building a nation, we are building an erasure,” characters and chorus repeat.
Indeed what churns throughout the dreamlike episodes — or perhaps they’re really nightmarish — is the question of how America’s history of slavery is dis-remembered.
Leonard and the creative team added visually arrestings layers of odd artifice on this already odd though jewel-like piece. Alison Heryer’s period-inspired costumes symbolically weight the slave characters down with bulbuous, twine-wrapped forms. Actors travel across the stage with highly stylized movements. A magistrate stands on stilts far above everyone else. Hyper bright elongated white neon lights, flank the proscenium and like a Dan Flavin installation turned on and off, flood the audience with light at the beginning and end. We are, after all, a part of this telling of American history.
Lang’s eerie, atmospheric, minimalist-infused score, conducted by Lyn Koenning, wraps the odd scenarios with mystery equal to their telling.
“Something has happened,” one character proclaims. “But I don’t know what.” If Lang and Wellman’s piece only offers more variants on an enigmatic tale of history-making, maybe some enigmas are better just left enigmas.
‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ continues at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at UT’s B. Iden Payne Theatre. www.texasperformingart.org
Comments
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By Veronica
April 30, 2010 10:28 AM | Link to this
Not know what this play was about…. I loved it. It kept my attention through the entire performance and left me wanting more. The case did an amazing job and the costumes were out of this world (awesome). Hands down, great job to the director Luke Leonard! I highly recommend this play and shame on you if you miss it!!!
By Linda Newland
April 25, 2010 8:03 PM | Link to this
The opportunity to see this production should not be missed. Everything about it was superb! I attended not knowing anything about the play but was intrigued with a brief description. I will be thinking about this for years, and, I believe it was this particular production that made it so mesmerizing. I urge everyone to go! The theater should be filled!!