Review of: Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.

vanloan@nyconstage.org

Entering the garage-like performance space of Williamsburg's Collapsable Hole, even the semi-darkness cannot disguise the plain, pine box coffin center stage.
Resting on a small mount in Maki Takenouchi's dirt-centric set, the box takes focus despite the small four piece (piano, guitar, jaw-harp and violin) band upstage. Snippets of dialogue are overheard and electronic text floats across the side of the coffin. As we take our places on the hard, wooden bleacher seats, the somber dirge-like mood for Immediate Medium Theater's impressive Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. has been set.

The play proves to be rigorously faithful to its source material: William Faulkner's expressionistic novel As I Lay Dying (which the author himself proclaimed a 'tour-de-force'). His first novel after The Sound and the Fury, it continues the stream of consciousness style of writing found in that work. It's the story of Anse Bundren (Hugh Sinclair) who promised his wife Addie on her death bed to bury her among her "people" (it's her coffin onstage and speaking in the voiceover. Her first line in the voiceover is: "I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time"). Addie's people are from Jefferson County, Mississippi the next county over from Yoknapatawpha County (the setting for most of Faulkner's work). Faulkner explores universal themes of love, grief, anger and denial as Anse packs up his children and makes the chaotic burial pilgrimage to the neighboring county.

Chuck Chuck Chuck also follows Faulkner's 'false start' writing style where we hear internal monologues from the various characters that are deliberately out of chronological order (the script is credited as a collaborative effort by the company). This device further fragments the narrative structure and we are left to piece together the various concerns and rivalries of the siblings to shape the dramatic flow. All the siblings have their own personal reasons to begin the funeral march and excepting Darl none of them have anything to due with honoring their mother's wishes (including Anse). As the journey of the dirt-poor Bundren family begins, a violent storm occurs causing a flood of Biblical proportions that threatens to derail the endeavor.
As the play progresses, it soon evolves that second-born son Darl (a phlegmatic Michael Rushton) will become our narrator of sorts. He seems to gleam the most insights from the primal expedition. The other children include the eldest son (and Addie's favorite), the perpetually angry Jewel (played by actress Megan Campisi), the secretly pregnant Dewey Dell (a desperate Siobhan Towey) and the adolescent Vardamen (scene stealing Liz Vacco) who drills a hole in the coffin lid so his mother can breathe. Before the family arrives at their destination in the neighboring county, they will encounter a fire, the breakdown of the funeral wagon's axel and the inevitable stench of the decomposing Addie.

Director J. J. Lind's mise-en-scene is as enigmatically murky as Faulkner's novel. That the piece works as often as it does (and is quite moving in individual moments) is a testament to the company's commitment. The technical aspects of the production especially the eerie soundscape that has the combined quality of opera and country music (Jacob Cooper) and the floating digital LED text and videos (Rob Ramirez) help immensely in grounding us in the Bundren's world. The company occasionally breaks out into semi-hypnotic dance routines in the dirt (choreography by Ms. Vacco) that is oddly reminiscent of Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury (April, Seventh 1928) another Faulkner adaptation. But it's the cheerless view of a life of poverty that gives the ring of truth to the piece. As Anse says at one point: "Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It's because there is a reward for us above, where they can't take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord. Hyah!"

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