Hamlet, with truly Shakespearian ambiguity, calls it something after death, and the afterlife is certainly a rewarding challenge to stage. Edgar Lee Masters did it in free verse in Spoon River Anthology, with each character alone in reflection. Samuel Beckett did it in Play, with three souls isolated as individuals but bound together by obsession.
Now Montreal's SaBooge Theatre has taken on the job with its devised work Every Day Above Ground (at Performance Space 122, off-off-Broadway). He-who-has-passed has lots of company here, haunted as he is by ghosts from life. The piece is inspired by Michael Ondaatje's 1970 novella The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (Ondaatje, by the way, also wrote The English Patient). The novella is a long poem-cum-prose combining fact and myth about the well-known outlaw in a vision of him as the dearly departed - after he received the fatal bullet from Sheriff Garrett in 1881. Accordingly, Every Day is a spooky bit of expressionism, less drama than hallucination. It presents The Kid, newly deceased, meeting up with the individuals/prototypes from his life - employer, friend, victim, Garrett, etc... Without story or narrative of any sort, it's a kaleidoscope of visions, with a stylization more true than realism.
This brief, complex play is so abstruse that much of it defies interpretation. Some characters are biographically factual persons, others, apparently, personifications. And when they refer to B the K's life, the referent isn't fleshed out. Nearly everything is haloed in an arresting ambiguity. Perhaps Sheriff Garret shot the wrong man. Who knows?. If life is beyond comprehension, what must the afterlife be?
Every Day has a beautiful, evocative set, and lighting that's alternately subtle and stunning. From time to time, scenes are punctuated by lights focused directly in our eyes, and the stage picture blacks out. It's like the revelation at the moment of death. The actors lay on the south-west accent mercilessly, and after a while its annoying cadence takes on a life of its own. The fact of eternal dialogue is more important than its content.
There are couple of techniques that are self-consciously avant-garde and intrusive on the otherwise smooth flow of scenes. But this is very meticulous work, highlighted by a nervous, kinetic performance by Trent Pardy as the late William Bonney. It takes inspiration and technical skill to create stagework simultaneously so bold and so commanding. What terrific theater!
- Steve Capra
March 2007