Review Roundup: BUGHOUSE Opens at the Vineyard Theatre

The world premiere of Bughouse opened tonight at Vineyard Theatre, conceived and directed by Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Obie Award winner and MacArthur “Genius” fellow Martha Clarke. The reviews are in! See what the critics had to say in our roundup below! 

Bughouse features a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley, adapted from the writings of Henry Darger, and stars Obie Award-winning performance artist John Kelly as Darger.

Visionary director Martha Clarke brings us inside the mind of one of the 20th century’s most startling outsider artists, Henry Darger — a reclusive janitor whose extraordinary body of paintings and writings was only fully discovered after his death. In his cramped Chicago apartment, Darger created a vast, fantastical universe, filled with child warriors, epic battles, and haunting beauty – an alternate reality through which he could escape his own. With text adapted from Darger’s own writings by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart), featuring an unforgettable visual and aural landscape, and starring Obie Award-winning performance artist John Kelly, Bughouse offers an intimate examination of a self-taught artist’s compulsion to create — even when no one is watching.

The creative team for Bughouse is Neil Patel (Production Design), Donna Zakowska (Costume Design), Christopher Akerlind (Lighting Design), Arthur Solari (Sound Design), John Narun (Projection Design), Faye Armon-Troncoso (Set Decoration & Props), Fred Murphy (Cinematography), Ruth Lingford (Animation), Michael Bonesteel (Art Historian Consultant), and Olivia Fletcher (Production Stage Manager).  Bughouse is produced in association with Jayne Baron Sherman.

Loren Noveck, Exeunt: Bughouse’s use of technology feels more sophisticated and sharper than what you’d see in one of those “immersive Van Gogh” art exhibits. Alongside the projections, Arthur Solari’s sound design and Christopher Akerlund’s lighting effectively build a liminal world. But as a theater piece, it’s shockingly inert. Even at barely an hour long, it repeats itself, in a way that I imagine is meant to speak to Darger’s recurring preoccupations but instead feels like a heavy-handed way to zero in on his central traumas.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Clarke’s resulting play, Bughouse, is a visually evocative but dramatically inert performance piece that touches on Darger’s troubled personal story, his penchant for self-isolation, and his fixations on Catholicism and threats to childhood innocence (which he often depicted with graphic violence and nudity). But the script by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) consists mostly of an undiagnosed schizophrenic’s stream of consciousness rants, interrupted by the occasional aural hallucination (mostly the voices of nuns and young girls).

Caroline Cao, New York Theatre Guide: Clarke renders Bughouse as a haunting piece about an artist’s ego and thwarted innocence, but the production’s restraint is also its weakness. Even a sturdy Kelly holds back on penetrative inquiries into Darger. The visual and animated designs drench the man’s study in his disheveled mindscape and ineffable awe of his paintings, but the production erects a steely dam behind which its watercolors long to spill out.

Average Rating: 40.0%