Mystery and love, two of the great themes and pleasures of the theater (and life), are also essential foodstuffs for writing about theater. You can smell the love in every molecule of air in a small off- or off-off-Broadway theater, particularly in a staging by a young company of a play with a large cast. These kids aren't doing it for the money, though the production and the acting may be highly professional. They love being with each other and they love the theater. You can't miss that.
That love goes a long way towards solving the mystery, too - the mystery of why they are doing it when they obviously aren't getting paid much, if anything. But a deeper question remains: what makes the task of acting out a play such a powerful thing that it induces all that hard work with no promise of material gain, and so beautiful as to foster all that love?
Howard Richardson and William Berney's Dark of the Moon, set in 1920s Appalachia, is about the very things that make theater itself such a joyful mystery - love, singing, dancing, fear. Since its 1940s Broadway run, the play - a strange mélange of Romeo and Juliet, Dracula, creation myths, "The Little Mermaid" (the original, sad story), and for you modern kids, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the difficult love life of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - has been popular in school productions (so I'm told) but is rarely revived professionally. This was my first experience of it. Judging from reviews of earlier productions, either I am unusually prone to liking the play, or this is a superior staging.
The story takes place in two worlds. "Up the mountain," the realm of witches and conjurers, intersects now and again with the valley where the regular folk live. Like fictional picturesque country peoples everywhere, these superstitious Smoky Mountain humans love to sing and dance. The story is very loosely pulled from the ancient ballad "Barbara Allen," though the authors made up their own myth about the character: John, a witch boy, wants to become human so he can be with Barbara, a randy human girl he's fallen in love with. You can take the witch off the mountain, but can you take all the darkness out of the witch?
Director Ian Crawford and his energetic cast power through the play's strange rhythms with conviction, vision, and talent. The result is a dark, troublesome, moving love story. There's lots of song, though it isn't a musical. There are puppets, but it's not for children. There's a wedding, and humor, but it's not a comedy, and there's a revival meeting at which a most "un-Christian" thing occurs.
John (the very game and suitably intense Noah Dunham) makes his initial "deal with the Devil" in a long opening scene that feels like a Yeats play - incantatory, unreal, portentious. Conjur Man and Conjur Woman are played by puppets run by four actors each speaking in unison, a startling and effective conceit. The witches, for their part, move low to the ground, slinky and sensuous but somehow cold and reptilian too. Then suddenly we're at a barn dance in the valley where the humans are whooping it up, until Uncle Smelicue (the entertaining but anachronistically dressed Adam Fujita) notes that "it ain't no natural night for a dance." (The cast's southern drawl is pretty steady and convincing.)
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