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Bodies sprawl on railroad tracks, crumpled like rag dolls, while eerie songs hang in the air and voices whisper just out of range. As dawn breaks, a man rises to gnawing hunger, while a woman tries to teach him to fill his belly by taking in slow breaths of air, flavored only by the memory of fried guava cakes.
In "Fugitive Pieces", now playing at Cleveland Public Theatre, Caridad Svich's drifters scavenge, fight, and tend each other's wounds as they wander through a nightmare landscape pockmarked with abuse, sexual violence, privation, and madness. It's a meandering journey, with peculiar interpolations of images and odd snatches of song. Yet there's a fugitive beauty to the poetry of the language, moments of tenderness, and a wry humor -- as well as several fine performances -- that ultimately make the trip a satisfying one.
"Fugitive Pieces" is essentially a road trip of mythic proportions, one of two drifters meeting, parting, and reconnecting. Woozy from hunger, Troubled John (Sean Booker) dreams of drive-in movies and memories of his Bible-spewing cop-stepbrother Steve. He is befriended by the more pragmatic and volatile Downcast Mary (Ebani Edwards), who teaches him how to jump boxcars. As they ride the rails, they meet up with the guitar-strumming Israfel (a charismatic, sly Robert Williams) and his addled mother Providence (a deliciously cracked Rebecca Spencer), who can make a symphony of variations on her one sound: "Raaaa".
Small, bone-thin, yet fierce as a crackling live wire, Edwards is a wonderful Mary: she handles the dense language as though it just popped into her head, and the complex welter of emotions without a shred of sentimentality. She and Booker have a believable, appealing chemistry. As he sits, abandoned by her, with a cardboard sign around his neck -- "Sermons $1" - he's the image of haplessness.
Already densely metaphoric and overflowing with barbed-wire poetry, Svich's imagistic piece is pumped up to a hallucinogenic fare-thee-well by experimental director Ann Kai. Each directorial touch seems calculated to invoke a carnival sense of the grotesque: there are swirling, masked figures hissing behind the audience seat platforms, a stilt-walking singer, even an accordion-playing, tricycle-riding transsexual (Baby Dee) accompanied by marionette-like dancers. At times the images are so fresh, they startle with a pure delight; at others, their very showiness gets in the way of hearing what's going on.
Similarly, the songs' musical accompaniment seems intentionally freaky, with low, off-key strumming and plinking music-box effects to keep the listener off-balance.But over time, the slow pile-up of dream-like images, sounds, and poetry -- some frightening, some grimly ugly, some weirdly tender -- makes for memorable theatricality. Svich's play is the kind that leaves afterimages on the back of your eyelids that won't easily go away after you leave the theatre. Even after you close your eyes, they persist, insist, insinuate themselves. You'll never see a man standing by the road, holding a cardboard sign, the same way again.
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