Theatre in Review: Terce: A Practical Breviary (HERE/Prototype Opera)/Mahinerator (The Tank)

	Heather Christian (top), Steve Mellor (bottom). Photos: Maria Baranova.

Last week was distinguished by two productions offering expertise and bafflement in equal measure; easy to admire and hard to parse, each at least offers notable artists doing what they do best.

In her recent works, Heather Christian has established herself as the theatre's official liturgist. That few others are angling for the title doesn't diminish her accomplishment: She possesses a distinctive musical voice, blending elements of soul, folk, plainchant, and indie pop into melodies that are celebratory, even ecstatic. In Terce, now playing at The Space at Irondale, she has audience members rocking in their seats; at the performance I attended, at least a few were moved to stand up and sway to the irresistible rhythms.

Unusually for the avant-garde theatre, Christian has a theological turn of mind. Oratorio for Living Things, seen in 2022, is a devotional work, combining scientific and sacred elements in a text in English and Latin. It features a haunting score but, more than that, her insistence on the numinous quality of everyday existence was manna for audiences hollowed out by the pandemic and a toxic political culture. In Oratorio and Terce, she provides affirmation to a world desperate for it, using musical tools that are sophisticated and strikingly unsentimental.

Terce is based on the 9am service of canonical hours, although you might not immediately connect it to the practices of cloistered religious orders. Christian refers to the project as "a wild riff on a breviary Mass," adding, "Today we are looking at the Holy Spirit through the lens of the Divine Feminine." She adds, "This is a hot-button issue among theologians. I don't imagine I have to explain." Thomas Merton, a passionate advocate for the concept, might have something to say about that but never mind; in a contemporary theatre wedded to issues revolving around personal identity, Christian's search for a larger, all-enveloping sense of meaning makes her something of a prophetic figure.

In Terce she draws on some of the Church's greatest female minds, including Hildegard of Bingen (herself the heroine of two previous musicals) and Julian of Norwich, composing a song cycle that celebrates the feminine in quotidian reality with an emphasis on the natural world. The words, whether original or adapted, often have the slant of poetry: "I can't see it right unless it's told to me with color/And then I in turn, tell another/Who in turn tells someone else." Equally powerful is this image from Julian: "A wound of contrition/A wound of compassion/A wound of the earnest longing for someone." Spiritual and ecological concerns intertwine in the following passage: "Lord remind me I'm a poppyseed/That once my feet have touched the ground/you can't discourage me/That you can pour over your concrete/Build your parking lot and DMV/That for 50 or a thousand years, I sleep under the thing you build on top of me."

Indeed, so evocative is Christian's text that it's a pity most of it is unintelligible. This is largely a function of how the songs are orchestrated and vocally arranged so it is clearly an artistic choice. Perhaps it is enough: Thanks to Keenan Tyler Oliphant's kinetic, highly confident staging, the cast moves in and around the audience with roof-raising authority. (The movement sequences are by Christian, Oliphant, and Darlene Christian.) And, to be fair, the libretto is displayed on two projection screens, one full page at a time; however, the words are difficult to make out and the music's headlong pace doesn't allow one to time to take them in.

In other respects, the production has been assembled with care. The environmental design by Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin creates a kind of canopy or crisscrossing ropes, lit with subtly colorful touches by Masha Tsimring. Brenda Abbandandolo's costumes seem to come from some particularly stylish branch of the Shakers. Nick Kourtides' sound design deals aptly with the cavernous Irondale space.

Christian presides over the cast with a fierce intensity, energetically driving her gifted performers through their paces. And it may very well be that the experience of them raising their glorious voices is enough for most audiences. In a larger sense, Christian's intentions are clear, even if many soul-stirring words get obscured. Then again, it's difficult not to feel that something crucial is missing. It's possible to be seduced by Terce yet leave feeling faintly unsatisfied. If, however, you adored Oratorio for Living Things, chances are you won't want to miss this.

At least Terce is written in recognizable English; for Mahinerator, playwright Jerry Lieblich has invented his own private language. Well, sort of; he runs English through a blender, mixing and mashing it until the words have acquired extra syllables or are jostled loose from their original meanings. Consider the script's opening lines: "And then they told me I was bupkis: just a reggalar bunkie bumpkin on der Fietderplatz what like unto the rest of em, the mostly sorried lot. After all I done there did. After all I done did up for thems, for allathems. For the whole be-tootin Plotzderscene." Got that?

This, of course, is a stratagem employed by writers ranging from James Joyce to Anthony Burgess to Russell Hoban. But it has almost always been done in prose, where the reader can proceed at a measured pace. Sitting in a theatre, hearing it delivered (however impressively) by the actor Steve Mellor, one's brain races to keep up with the flood of neologisms. The result is a sensory overload that obscures the narrative. I am left in the embarrassing position of not being able to describe the plot of Mahinerator in anything but the vaguest detail.

Lieblich studied under Mac Wellman, the theatre's leading linguistic manipulator, but, in my experience, Wellman's pieces have more abstract objectives. Mahinerator, which involves (I think) the rise and fall of an inventor and entrepreneur, has (I'm pretty sure) a fairly involved storyline. Even as Mellor raced forward, my mind stumbled over the playwright's inventions, wondering if words like "bumpkie bumpkin" or "in the blinking of a tweezer's toenail," weren't just a little too cute, or what exactly was meant by "So lemme find on right precisulated dictionari-parts what mighta just rightly paint for yaz the real capote Bierstadt, if yer smellin what I stink." After a few minutes of struggling to keep up, it occurred to me that, rather than trying to assimilate each coinage, I should let the general flow of words pull me along but, alas, no. To quote the author, "So lemme tells ya what I dids, and lemme make it clears like blister:" I ultimately found myself tuning out.

But not entirely, thanks to Mellor, whose performance is so authoritative that never did I doubt he knew what exactly he was doing. Indeed, his command of the text, the ability to infuse it with nuance and emotional force, constitutes a show in itself; the most corkscrewed sentence comes trippingly off his golden tongue. Mellor, a distinguished performer with a long list of Wellman works to his credit, is, clearly, not afraid of a script that requires heavy exegesis on the actor's part. Lieblich and his co-director, Meghan Finn, have surely worked intensively with their star to provide much-needed pace and punch. The production also features typically solid lighting by Brian Aldous and effective incidental music by Mike Cassidy.

But, like Terce, Mahinerator is more impressive than engaging; it's a kind of theatrical Tower of Babel bursting that words that defy one's ability to process them. That's all I can tell you; as Lieblich says, "And so I now, having spoken full unto this time encapsulator, returnteth to my duty...I have much belicking what to do." --David Barbour