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The in-dark answered with wind
Jay Scheib's Bellona, Destroyer of Cities is not a direct translation of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975). As both the author and the playwright acknowledged during the post-show conversation, the nine-hundred-page novel would make either a terrific miniseries or a week-long festival in a consenting city somewhere; neither is going to fit onstage in ninety minutes. Not to mention the prose is so dense, cyclical, unreliable, etc., any kind of adaptation should just feel like chaos up on a screen. And so it does, when it starts. The opening-scene orgy scared two or three people out of the audience1 and the next bit with the astronaut at the bar probably confused everyone else, but it doesn't take long for different threads of plot to begin to emerge from the sex and violence and fragments of poetry, all interweaving the drifter Kid's odyssey through the city of Bellona, cloud-covered, burning, quite possibly unstuck in time, a dissociative place that is itself an unstable text. There is a notebook of poems which existed before Kid came to Bellona, but which could only have been written by Kid about Bellona; they both reproduce Kid's memories (which are themselves somewhat damaged) and foretell the end of the story, which is not really an end. Carrying the notebook everywhere, Kid adds to them, rewrites, edits, eventually publishes, albeit with mixed results. Perhaps what Kid is writing is Bellona. It's an enigmatic collage of a world and so of a play, with video projection offering otherwise unavailable views on the action and basic stage effects being applied in plain sight. But it—reminds me of Jubilee (1977), now that I write this, because it's full of jags and breaks and switchbacks and should have lost the audience with the tonal shifts alone and instead, if it doesn't all quite hold together, it holds on.
And there is a lot of sex in it, of all sorts, which I appreciated, and I particularly like that the indeterminacy of Bellona in this version extends to the protagonist's gender: Kid in Dhalgren is male. Kid in Bellona, Destroyer of Cities is played by Sarita Choudhury2 and sometimes addressed as a woman, as when the character of Lanya identifies Kid as "[her] girlfriend"—sometimes as a man, as with the recurring line, "Some things are easier for guys." At different points in the narrative, Kid can be found in skirts, men's shirts, half a pair of pajamas, low-belted cargo pants, and an androgynous grey T-shirt that is shortly covered in blood. And after one particularly mystifying interaction with a lover, Kid says in exasperation to a third party, "I just wanted to get my cock sucked!" and the man's response is an offer to blow Kid, which Kid takes him up on. You see why the pronoun difficulty. It is possible that this character is not strictly Dhalgren's Kid, but the next iteration to enter Bellona as interpreted from the last scene of the novel, but still: it was offhand genderfuck and I approve. The next traveler in this version is Choudhury's daughter, coming gravely down through the audience in the final scene.
So it's a shape-changing piece, like the city it's named for; it deserves more critical attention than I can give it at this hour of the night, but Delany said afterward that he had seen it five times, that each time it was different, and that this production was his favorite so far. If you can make the matinée tomorrow, go. I even think my father enjoyed it.
1. I am not joking, either about the orgy or the people who got up and left. At one point, someone mostly naked goes to fetch a glass of water and hand it to someone else in the middle of the scrum on the mattress, because it's been (onstage, five minutes; in-play) hours and people get dehydrated after that much sex. It was great.
2. Whom I just discovered in February with Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1992), her film debut. I kept meaning to write about that movie. It's a good thing no one's paying me for this stuff.
And there is a lot of sex in it, of all sorts, which I appreciated, and I particularly like that the indeterminacy of Bellona in this version extends to the protagonist's gender: Kid in Dhalgren is male. Kid in Bellona, Destroyer of Cities is played by Sarita Choudhury2 and sometimes addressed as a woman, as when the character of Lanya identifies Kid as "[her] girlfriend"—sometimes as a man, as with the recurring line, "Some things are easier for guys." At different points in the narrative, Kid can be found in skirts, men's shirts, half a pair of pajamas, low-belted cargo pants, and an androgynous grey T-shirt that is shortly covered in blood. And after one particularly mystifying interaction with a lover, Kid says in exasperation to a third party, "I just wanted to get my cock sucked!" and the man's response is an offer to blow Kid, which Kid takes him up on. You see why the pronoun difficulty. It is possible that this character is not strictly Dhalgren's Kid, but the next iteration to enter Bellona as interpreted from the last scene of the novel, but still: it was offhand genderfuck and I approve. The next traveler in this version is Choudhury's daughter, coming gravely down through the audience in the final scene.
So it's a shape-changing piece, like the city it's named for; it deserves more critical attention than I can give it at this hour of the night, but Delany said afterward that he had seen it five times, that each time it was different, and that this production was his favorite so far. If you can make the matinée tomorrow, go. I even think my father enjoyed it.
1. I am not joking, either about the orgy or the people who got up and left. At one point, someone mostly naked goes to fetch a glass of water and hand it to someone else in the middle of the scrum on the mattress, because it's been (onstage, five minutes; in-play) hours and people get dehydrated after that much sex. It was great.
2. Whom I just discovered in February with Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1992), her film debut. I kept meaning to write about that movie. It's a good thing no one's paying me for this stuff.
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Well, I am not sure it was performed anywhere near you.
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