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.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Times: The production is most effective when it is simply trying to suggest a tormented, mystical mind in small impressionistic touches, helped as well by Christopher Akerlind’s lighting design. Clarke, who has been creating unclassifiable dance-theater works since the 1980s with such pieces as “Garden of Earthly Delights” and “Vienna: Lusthaus,” remains one of the most visually driven directors in activity — a compliment, to be clear.

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.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: Conceived and directed by MacArthur “genius” Martha Clarke, who is herself 81, and is best known for her having created a vivid work of dance theater from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the play has a script by Beth Henley, Pulitzer-winning playwright of “Crimes of the Heart,” based on Darger’s own writing. It stars John Kelly, an Obie-winning actor and himself a visual artist. Yet despite its near-legendary creative team, its short running time and some moments of visual invention, “Bughouse” failed to keep my interest, much less convince me of Darger’s greatness in “the art brut canon” or anywhere else.

Carole di Tosti, Blogcritics: An unknown for almost his whole life, the incredible outsider artist and epic novelist Henry Darger (1892-1973) comes alive at the Vineyard Theatre in the multimedia work Bughouse. Adapted from Darger’s writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley’s 70-minute play enthralls. With direction by Drama Desk and Obie Award winner Martha Clarke and sharp conceptualizations of Darger’s life and work, it is some of Clarke’s finest work.

Adam Feldman, TimeOut New York: Glancing is what this production does best: It’s a visual experience more than a visceral one. Directed by Martha Clarke, who has an excellent eye for beauty, the play is a bit of a tableau vivant. The set, by production designer Neil Patel and set decorator Faye Armon-Troncoso, is a piece of cluttered art in itself, and it is also the canvas for other very fine work: Christopher Akerlind’s lighting, John Narun’s projections, Fred Murphy’s cinematography, Ruth Lingford’s animation. The result is a diverting way to spend an hour at the Vineyard Theatre, and a fair introduction to Darger and his work, but—perhaps out of respect—it seems unwilling to take imaginative or critical liberties. While the play’s heart is in the right place, its portrait of an archetypical outsider doesn’t afford him much internal life.

Sara Holdren, Vulture: Despite Henley’s effort to collage snippets of Darger’s writing into some kind of arc — here delivered by the show’s solo actor, John Kelly, a prolific East Village performance artist in the 1980s — the material continuously pushes back at its shapers. It doesn’t really want to be a play, at least not in the conventional sense. Watching Kelly shuffle from typewriter to windowsill to mantelpiece on Neil Patel’s cluttered tenement diorama of a set, I kept wishing we were anywhere other than a theater.

Samuel L. Leiter, Theaterlife: It’s hard not to wonder what about this project appealed to director Clarke, whose most acclaimed work makes striking use of choreographic movement and inventive visual images. Nothing here calls for her special skills, with a single old man shuffling in slacks and blue shirt (costume by Donna Zakowska) around his crowded space. And Kelly’s flat performance, with its childlike intonations and sing-song rhythms, needs a sharper directorial hand to make Darger both convincing and compelling.

James Wilson, Talkin' Broadway: Despite the animated visuals, Bughouse lacks the exuberant theatricality one might expect from Clarke. Instead, the concept leans into the claustrophobia of the artist's life. Neil Patel's impressive production design offers a faithful recreation of Darger's cluttered apartment and studio (which may be viewed at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago), yet its slavish attention to veracity limits the expansiveness of the subject. (Faye Armon-Troncoso's set decoration and props, Christopher Akerlind's lighting, and Donna Zakowska costume design notably contribute to the hyperrealism.) Darger was noted for working on a grand scale, but here he is presented in miniature.

Kendra Jones, Front Row Center: He’s obsessed with a missing and murdered young girl, Elsie, fantasizing in a cripplingly sad yet almost-sensual-yet and disturbingly distraught way towards a lost newspaper clipping that contains her photo. We see her reflection on his armoire mirror: a child-rebel leader. We see an imagined version of his leading child character, Annie Aronburg. The Vivian Girls training for battle! His world is built in front of us from a collection of absorbing, enveloping audio, set, and visuals. Bughouse is truly a crafting of art itself, presenting the world that surrounded Darger, unreserved honesty and sculpture.

Matthew Wexler, 1 Minute Critic: For all the effort, Clarke and Henley fail to sculpt a captivating story arc. Instead, we’re left with 70 minutes of ramblings—likely a reflection of the real-life artist’s struggles with mental illness and social disorders. Kelly appears swallowed by the enormity of it all, leaving us to wonder what Henry Darger’s life might have been had the world valued and nurtured rather than shunned him.

Average Rating: 54.2%