Theatre in Review: Peregrinations (Dutch Kills Theatre/Long Story Short at The Tank)

The members of Long Story Short, a self-termed "devising ensemble," couldn't have picked a more apt time for Peregrinations, which examines the five-alarm emergency that immigration has become in this country. According to the program notes, this collection of wordless vignettes "draws on experiences of the ensemble, as well as interviews with immigrants from different places and backgrounds, examining intersections of the personal and the political, of past and future, and ultimately inflection points of fear, hope, and loss." It's a welcome concept, and, sometimes, in execution, it crystallizes the predicaments of immigrants who are so often greeted with hostility in this country, even as they fill vital jobs and contribute to the economy.

In Peregrinations this point is sometimes made with striking, if often mysterious, stage pictures: A lineup of people, seemingly waiting to get through customs, are made to put on grotesque faces with wildly exaggerated features. Are they being caricatured? Demonized? Or is it an attempt to make them blend in? Later, they stand in front of a metal frame that seemingly represents a holding pen; it (and they) is gradually pushed offstage in a gesture of dismissal. In another sequence they gingerly step into water, calling up images of refugees struggling to get across the Rio Grande. A performer wipes the stage floor, using cleaning fluid from a plastic bottle. Thanks to a bit of puppet wizardry, the bottle, combined with a piece of fabric, becomes a small child who intrudes on the scene. A tableau of tiny paper boats placed on a wildly see-sawing panel recalls accounts of overloaded rafts filled with immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. In what may be the most evocative bit of business, members of the company are herded behind that metal frame, which, in a startling act of erasure, is gradually boarded up.

To be clear, I'm reading a lot into each of the above sequences; the company, in pursuit of a poetic language of movement, is often confoundingly vague in practice. Peregrinations lacks a consistent, understandable throughline; I don't want to suggest that much of the seventy-minute piece is filler, but, for long stretches, I didn't know what I was looking at. Thanks to the piece's loose, allusive structure, the powerful moments fade in and out with a kind of dream logic. Between them, one is left to mark time, often impatiently.

Especially confusing is the use of masks, which are donned and discarded according to no discernible logic. Derived from the creations of Jacques Lecoq, the noted French theatre artist, they are called "larval masks," because, the program says, "The larval state correlates to the shifting, liminal identities imposed by border crossings. The self fragments in these spaces: scrutinized, categorized, demonized." Well, all right, but their use in Peregrinations often seems oddly arbitrary. They do make an impression, however, as do the puppets created by Erin Orr. One of them, a life-sized, babushka-wearing woman who harasses indifferent bureaucrats, is one of the more astonishing achievements of its type to be seen in some time.

It's difficult to say what Blake Habermann, credited with "outside eye direction," brought to the project; in any case, he hasn't managed to clarify it. The lighting designer, Yang Yu, has an interesting and original color sense, combining a mint green with deep blue and a saturated yellow/amber to attention-getting effect. I look forward to seeing her work again.

Of course, artists must go where they will, treating their subjects as they see fit. Still, Peregrinations feels like a missed opportunity, reducing a situation defined by suffering and terror into a presentation that feels too aesthetic and willfully mysterious. Something stronger, more pointed, is needed just now, I think. --David Barbour