Bughouse Off-Broadway Reviews

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 w...

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.

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 effective...

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.

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 innoc...

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).

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 dr...

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.

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 ...

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.

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 B...

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.

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 se...

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.

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 ...

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.

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 shuffl...

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.

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 ...

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.

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 mir...

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.

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 swall...

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.