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.)
Singing songs is one of these poor folks' favorite daily pleasures, from songs about hooch to songs about old folk tales and superstitions. The Allens' house has a whole wall of musical instruments. Song is more than cheer, though - it's fate. The story a song tells - and whether it's sung to the end, or interrupted - matters a great deal in this odd world.
Another favorite activity, of course, is sex, without which - as in much of life - there'd be no story to tell. The youngsters indulge in it in spite of the powerful presence of the Church, which is represented by the charismatic Preacher Haggler (Jake Thomas). Jessica Howell, as Ms. Metcalf, adorably plays up her character's crush on the Preacher, quite stealing her scenes. Yet not much worse can be said of a person than that "she pleasured herself [referring to sex, not masturbation] before she were married."
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