William Burke and Co. #goforth at JACK
With last year's Comfort Dogs: Live From the Pink House, playwright and director William Burke set three dogs and five dog-like actor-musicians loose in Jack's foil-lined space in Clinton Hill to thrilling results. How is he following the act? By upping the ante. In PIONEERS#goforth, audiences can expect magic, music, snow, and actors suspended above them.
"There's going to be a net that we're climbing up...hopefully." explained Ugo Chukwu, an actor in the piece. "Maybe a figurative net. Or a proverbial net. A net of your mind. Quantum physics. Stay WOKE."
To train for the net, actors spent a recent rehearsal in the Bushwick Starr performing their dreamy prose while rolling around on all fours and emulating a sense of imbalance.
"It came from the idea that we can always feel like we're free falling and stuck at the same time," Burke explained of the piece. "We all are on the verge of exploding," added actor Zoë Geltman. It's a bittersweet seesaw continuously present. "We all have these explosions and that may remind you of oh, suicide, or a breakdown."
The deeply soulful Catherine Brookman composed and performs the the play's score, which tinges with Walt Whitman angst (the title is hashtagged from "Pioneers! O Pioneers!").
"It's a go for broke approach to Walt Whitman. The music is epic to match the fury of the words," Brookman said. "I remember reading him a lot as a kid and feeling very dramatic in my own life. Those words--I related to them in this melodramatic level. Like, 'Yeah, life is this hard, and nature is this!' Everything is so grand and full of reckoning. 'We primeval forests felling, / We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within, / We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving.' You can't undercut that!"
Brookman finds working with Burke unlike any other director she's collaborated with. "I felt less constrained because there were very few structures," she said. "He would give me adjectives. I love that, even though it's kind of abstract and loosey goosey. I like the way he's just very honest with you. It comforts me because there's nothing left unsaid."
The rehearsal had plenty of fury and howling as well as irreverence that can only come from a tight, well connected ensemble. "It's a call to arms. It's a William Burke show," Chukwu said. "We can go two steps too far."
PIONEERS#goforth plays March 24-April 2 at JACK (505 Waverly Avenue). Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2514133
Videos