Longacre Lea makes good on its promise of “physical productions of cerebral works” with this year’s Something Past in Front of the Light, an articulate, allusive, provoking examination of the nature of faith in the divine: whose promises can you trust?
Alexander Strain is stunning as a young man who presents himself to Christopher Henley’s documentary filmmaker with a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Strain’s character, so he says, is The Devil—Beelzebub himself—and the wants Henley to tell the story of his life. He can provide some home movie clips to fill in the details.
Whoever he is, Satan, or “Stan” as he comes to be known, is not of this world. He inhabits Strain’s body like one of David Byrne’s big suits; the voice is overloud and the social niceties ignored, as if he were somewhere in the midband of the autism spectrum; a barefoot, awkward gait recalls Shaw’s hoofed demon in Man and Superman. When Stan chooses to participate in a conversation, he speaks in koans—or are they midrashim? The easy sentiments of a pop love song, as well as the rare display of integrity of character, are equally likely to spin him into a collapse to the floor.
Kathleen Akerley’s script places this personification of negativity in a pop/classical culture context. Stan imagines the Crucifixion as a stage-managed cinematic event; a catfight on a strangely reflexive television reality program echoes the postures of Laocoön and his sons. A second-act encounter with Stan’s nemesis, his Other, is somewhat unsatisfying, suggesting as it does an audience with Bokonon over closed-circuit TV. But then, it was Satan who arranged this meeting. Double bluff?
- Something Past in Front of the Light, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington