The dragon was seriously eyeballing the audience—and what a lovely dragon it was, even if its gaze implied that if it had the mobility and energy to do so, we would all be its supper. Its tail flicked menacingly.
Quite why the dragon (one of a clutch of very cool puppets by Monkey Boys Productions) is there at the conclusion of The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, this critic shall leave to open to interpretation.
By this moment, the mysterious death of Peter (Tom Pecinka), one of a group of radical hippies living in the Northern California countryside, the arrival of Peter’s very un-hippieish brother Will (also Pecinka) to try and figure out the truth about his brother’s disappearance, and the hippies’ resistance to offering any kind of explanation or closure, had long since devolved into a wordy marsh of myth, allegory, and incantations.
The principal drive of this buzzy play—a Vineyard Theatre co-production with The Civilians, running to Dec. 7—is playwright Anne Washburn’s determination to reveal nothing for sure, to let her characters and their strange ways both compel and mystify an audience. The play’s excellent cast of actors animates a story—from the playwright of the cleverly Simpsons-themed, critically acclaimed Mr Burns: a Post-Electric Play—that variously excites, bores, and baffles.
It looks great too, directed by Steve Cosson, with a lovely, ramshackle farmhouse set designed by Andrew Boyce, rustic-hippy costuming (Emily Rebholz), and striking lighting (Amith Chandrashaker) and sound (Ryan Gamblin). We really feel like we’re down on the farm, and a very weird farm at that—both bucolic and as terrifying as Mrs. Lovett’s bakehouse.
The group’s apparent leader Thomas (Bruce McKenzie) is, for a hippie, surprisingly ruthless in taking charge, hiding evidence, and putting the home phone out of action to make sure no word gets out about Peter’s death. One character, Milo (Bobby Moreno), materializes as a narrator who as an adult has left the commune far behind. He reveals he was sexually assaulted while there.
Some things we do know: the hippies have disposed of Peter’s partly burned body. This they reason and rationalize away. They are so smug and weird you root for the conservative-looking Will, in his conventional clothes and solid regular-guy manner, to expose whatever has happened to his brother—and maybe force-feed the smugly withholding commune-dwellers food filled with colorings and additives.
The cast double as both the adults and the kids in the commune; for the latter Peter is reimagined as one of the small-holding’s piglets. A weird, too-long play within a play is mounted about an evil king (Donnetta Lavinia Grays), his lovely princess daughter (Cricket Brown), and a handsome suitor (Bartley Booz) who the king puts through many tortures to gain her hand in marriage. This tale includes some more cool puppets: glittery fish that jump around the licking flames of a cauldron. (There is also a very believable puppet chicken that jerks its head this way and that.)
That play-within-a-play, Peter’s project, was unfinished at the time of his death—and in the concluding scene we’re left with him in his final moments, a violent furnace, that eyeballing dragon, the leaping fish, and words of ritual. If you ever come across this group’s farm, you’d be highly recommended to carry on driving.
