There’s a moment in “Orion and the Goatman” at the Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan that may be the scariest epiphany I’ve ever heard on stage or off. Will Gallacher as Logan tells Brayden Bambino, who portrays Luke, that the stars he’s watching may be dead. Oh, and by the way, the sun is a star. So it too will die and with it, everything we know. In this play the father is the shining star that has burned out. The brothers go camping to scatter his ashes in woods they've been to more than a dozen times (14, to be precise). As they stare at stars that one day will stop burning, there's a terrifying, very real moment. Everything will end. The sense of infinite life is an illusion. The world will burn out like the fragile campfire so fastidiously created on stage in front of them.
Brayden Bambino as Luke realizes that the death of the sun means, no matter how glittering the present, one day the sun will go from sizzle to fizzle and the earth will be a dying ember. Everything will vanish. Yes, we’ll all be dead before that, but permanence is an illusion. The planet will be a cinder without the sun to supply life. The fact that life on earth will, unless things change drastically, end one day, to me, is a horrifying thought. Talk about depressing. Great art, great achievement, great accomplishment will burn out. All that will be left is ash, like the burned marshmallows we see held too close to the flame.
That’s a powerful moment and there are some others in this play by Will Murduck directed by Noah Eisenberg with strong performances by Gallacher and Bambino. The characters, though, move on easily from this moving moment, something that happens frequently in the play that becomes a parade of dialogue set against a trivial, not profound, plot. The problem with the story and structure is it is largely a series of moments that do not really build a powerful plot, and the arrival of a monster doesn’t feel real or dramatic, although it seems partly comic like a Halloween costume puppet being treated as if it is a real devil. Things seem like they'll get wild, society's veneer will vanish, but that never really happens.
The monster in the stories their father told them comes alive and they fight it, rather than dealing with the real demons this and probably every family has.
That means the play, which is so realistic, and with such well crafted characters, performance and dialogue, then becomes about a kind of fantastic, unbelievable threat, rather than the real, dramatic one mentioned regarding the sun’s final sunset. It's as if Halloween costumes suddenly are treated like horrible threats. The play feels so real, it's just hard to suspend disbelief at their horror when a sheet swoops down upon them like Casper the not so friendly ghost incarnate.
The brothers clash, but mostly on superficial levels. The promise of camping, stripped of technology, becoming our animal selves, isn’t realized. Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories wrote about leaving technology behind. They bring everything and the kitchen sink here - and the car is feet away as if they're car camping rather than truly engulfed in the wilderness. Logan may be escaping earth to the stars, but Luke brings it with him in a bag. In the end, I felt this play is filled with good dialogue, but that the plot seems imposed from outside rather than organic. The moments are stronger than the whole, the parts more interesting than the play itself.
I care about the brothers and the father who has passed. The threat in the woods, to me, is illusory. This is not a horror movie. And it's not, to me, a silly comedy. The real threat is death itself, disintegration, relationships that never really deepen between brothers, the inevitable end of life that took their father. Superficiality is what kills us day to day. And yet the plot seems to pursue a different track, which seems more comic than dramatic. I don’t feel that the two brothers have really got to know much more about each other, despite fights and some disagreements that go on too long.
The play, with masterfully written dialogue, clearly shows a playwright to be watched, listened to and reckoned with. And this two-hander never stalls or slows, although it does lack the synergy of a script that is more than the sum of its parts. The script seems to seesaw between comedy and drama, with a comic plot in the end hijacking the humanity. Sam Shepard’s “True West” is a great play about sibling rivalry where each wants success. It’s a battle, a boxing match, between brothers. It’s not clear to me whether these two are rivals, for success, respect or love, although they harbor some resentment. I don't get a sense that they get much deeper insight into each other or themselves. When we hear about a woman who wants to marry one brother, it seems like it will set the stage for some big moment. Instead, it seems hardly a revelation, but another bright moment, like a bumper in a pinball machine for the characters to bounce back from.
When the brothers profess love for each other, it doesn’t feel new or earned, but mostly an effort to impose an ending. Instead of real suffering, we saw a monster made out of sheets. There is a real monster in this story, but what is it? Bambino takes affront when Gallacher reminds him he is a half brother. That’s a fact, Gallacher says. Bambino says he is only a “half brother” because that’s what his brother calls him and the way he treats him. Despite the vase with ashes, we never learn that much about the father, who remains a source of a strange story, which occupies the brothers’ attention more than the father himself. We never hear the two brothers talking on a very deep level, but rather rehashing the ground they have gone over so many times before.
The set from the start promises a fascinating play and the production does a great job bringing this camp site to life. Marshmallows are thrown at the ground, a little bit like rice or other objects in a production of “True West” that I saw. We see a tent, fire that is masterfully lit, and watch Gallacher struggle to light it. The images of stars, white dots on black walls, look like bullet holes in the universe, beautiful and terrible at once. In my mind, at least, that struggle to truly light the fire seems to be mirrored by the plot. The fire never completely lights, although it does warm our hearts. The dialogue is entertaining, if some beats just go on too long. Still, the two brothers seem to argue and discuss more than truly struggle and deepen their relationship.
The script mostly sails along the smooth seas of superficiality like standup routine, with occasional dips into depths. When the makeshift monster arrives, made out of sheets rather than sounds and lights, they don’t really grow through the encounter. The car alarm and flashing lights, to me, were scarier, because they were real. Something that is not real cannot really feel dangerous. In theory, their father’s ashes protect them from this monster and this myth. The two brothers do draw closer, but in small ways. The road to revelations here is fairly tame. This is a good two hander about brothers, but it has the potential to be much better than that. The characters are much more interesting than the plot.
There is some rivalry between the two brothers. Gallacher is older and more knowledgeable. And Bambino’s character clearly resents that, but we don’t go very deep into this aspect of their relationship. We hear a little bit about the father dying, but even then there is mostly narrative and memory rather than emotion. “Orion and the Goatman” in the end is an example of great dialogue, but not great drama. There are a lot of laughs, but the script seems much weightier than that.
This production was clearly done with love, talent and attention to detail and this is a playwright who can write. The elephant in the room, for me, is that more emotional truths in the script, which instead gets lost in story, would make it stronger. Why did the father tell them this story? Why is it so meaningful? We get distracted by the strange story itself, rather than the real lives of the father, mother and brothers. The story of the Goatman, to me, is a frivolous fiction, a red herring. The people we see on stage are fascinating. They interest me much more than the characters, and the monster, in that story, and yet this story takes center stage. I wanted to know even more about the brothers, the father and their relationships. I had a sense that things were unsaid. But I’ll tell you this. I’ll never forgot that moment of dialogue about dying stars that mean everything we love one day will disappear, not because we die, but because the sun does.
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