Where 'Crows' Fly

A Murder of Crows

written by Mac Wellman

directed by David Levine

at the Loeb Experimental

Theater

March 2-4

"You've got to find the murder in your heart."

In Mac Wellman's "A Murder of Crows," we are presented with the Phillips clan--Southern, rural, brutal--at their nadir. Nella (Alexandra Marolachakis) is widowed after her husband dies in a freak accident; she and her children, Susannah and Andrew (Rebecca Wolfe and Dan Goor), are forced to move in with their seamy relatives, who spend most of their time either bickering or at the racetrack.

If it were only this simple. Wellman's script is a minefield of abstractions, a barrage of heavy-handed symbolism and non-linear (dis) connections. And where else to witness this fragmented and worn schema of juxtapositions than a junkyard? The mire is realized in James Murdoch's artfully ramshackle set. Littered with couches, barrels, tires and a clothesline, the audience is strewn around the playing space, indistinguishable from the wreckage.

The play itself is keenly aware of its own mechanisms, as knowingly random strings of speech appear and disappear within monologues like fireflies. This technique, while serving to highlight the play's more comedic elements, also wreaks havoc with any sense of conventional pacing.

The erratic motion that is inherent--both temporally and physically--in "Crows" results in an overall effect quite similar to motion sickness, leaving us to wonder queasily whether drama and Dramamine are derived from the same etymological root.

What fascinates here is not Wellman's imaginative yet forced theatrical parlour tricks, but rather the strong ensemble cast and the mesmerizing visual and emotional pitches achieved by their director, David Levine. When the play opens with Nella, we know we are already standing on unsure ground. In Marolachakis's hands, Nella's dialogue seems to come from a place both ancient and newborn. Her opening monologue in which she declares, "you always live downwind of something peculiar," feels just right.

No less impressive are Wolfe and Goor as her children. As the weather-obsessed Susannah, Wolfe gives a gracefully subtle performance, avoiding edgy fanaticism to render her apocalyptic yearnings as lyric. Goor's Andrew, home from the Gulf War, is shellacked in gold, silent and frozen. When he launches vigorously into a tightly woven monologue about the bliss and religious rapture of bombing Baghdad, he is both uncompromisingly hysterical and profound.

The play reaches its apex of pathos, however, in and her newly resurrected father, played by Levine. Literally rising from the dead before our eyes, Raymond is harbinger, father and weatherman rolled into one. While he is a remnant of the family's past, Raymond is also Susannah's signpost--he points the way for her to discover the crows, her lost brood. Here we sense the title's dual meaning, that while family is murder, the "murder" (the formal term for a flock of crows) is also family.

The relatives who Nella turns to for shelter are equally unique. Georgia, played at full throttle by Zoe Sarnat, is a white-trash-from-hell maniac, who constantly deflects attention away from the rivet in her head and towards the destitute houseguests. Her husband, Howard, (Alex Haseltine) is even more over the top.

His sincere admiration of "breath-taking bigotry" is a classic stereotype of Southerners that is blown so out of proportion that the revelation that he is really Middle Eastern, not a Phillips but a "Babaganush," is only part of a dizzying spiral of distortion. In "A Murder of Crows" reality is not only indistinguishable from fantasy but transcended by it.

In a play where crows wax philosophical on a swing (garbed in beautiful masks by Lara Ho) and there's no worse fate than "hauling grease from the grease pits," we are given up to the fantastical premise that while this world's continuity is tenuous at best, word and image are nevertheless inexorably linked. The ways in which Levine and his crew convey and actualize metaphor on stage are striking and, perhaps most importantly, watchable in the extreme.

Wellman's punctuated symbolism may cause the play's action to trip and stumble, but this production never lets it fall. Exhilarating in its energy alone, "A Murder of Crows" rarely fails to captivate.