Warrior Girls Aswirl in an Artist's Mind

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 12, 2003
Warrior Girls Aswirl in an Artist's Mind
By BARRY SINGER

Like a painting still in progress, "Jennie Richee,"
the hallucinatory music-theater piece inspired by the
work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, continues to
receive new artistic touches. In its latest brief
appearance in Brooklyn — a homecoming of sorts — it
now has fresh choreography and additional music.

The production, by the avant-garde Ridge Theater,
written by Mac Wellman and directed by Bob McGrath,
was developed in 2000 at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn
Heights, the original home of Arts at St. Ann's. On
Tuesday, it opens at St. Ann's Warehouse on the
Brooklyn waterfront for a dozen performances. 

Darger, who was born in 1892 and died in Chicago in
1973, is probably best known for the illustrations to
his 15,000-page novel "The Story of the Vivian Girls,
in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the
Glandelinian War Storm, or the Glandico-Abbiennian
Wars, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." The
manuscript centers on seven prepubescent crusading
sisters called the Vivian Girls, who set out to
liberate a population of children held captive by the
Glandelinians, voracious adult males. The girls
succeed, but not before enormous battles and loss of
life.

The more than 300 illustrations range from dainty
watercolors to 12-foot scrolls, many double-sided. The
pictures, dense with huge flowers and butterflies,
show hordes of baby-faced girls clothed and naked,
some with horns, some with penises, some being
disemboweled, others being strangled. 

Describing these as "skewed versions of Kate
Greenaway's Victorian illustrations," the critic
Robert Hughes said it would be a mistake to consider
Darger "a sort of Poussin of pedophilia." The art, he
said, showed its maker's genuine talent, power of
formal arrangement and sense of color.

In 1997, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York
mounted a major Darger retrospective. Mr. Wellman, a
downtown playwright celebrated for his off-center
sensibility, saw it.

"The show made a huge impression on me," Mr. Wellman
recalled recently. "Seeing those paintings in their
actual size is very powerful emotionally. There's a
sense of monumental sculpture to them, a bit like
Michelangelo. When I met Bob McGrath, I asked if he
was familiar with Henry Darger. When he said he
wasn't, I gave him my copy of the catalog. That's how
it started."

Mr. McGrath, a founder of the Manhattan-based Ridge
Theater, a 15-year-old collective, said he was "amazed
by Darger."

"He was a sad visionary," Mr. McGrath said, "who lived
his life by himself, who couldn't interact with
people, and created this entire world for himself. It
is a disturbing world, but he had a tough life; his
dad whipped him, he wound up at the Asylum for
Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Ill. But, you know,
all boys draw pictures like this in class. Darger just
never grew up."

Perhaps the most intimate elements derived from Darger
for "Jennie Richee" are contributed by the designer
Laurie Olinder, who conjures, on slides and scrims,
the play's visual universe. "Most of my imagery is
directly from the paintings," Ms. Olinder said. "I
kind of got myself into the head of Henry Darger to
make my slides. I sort of traced his own tracing
method." (Darger used children's books, comic strips
and advertisements to trace the figures in his art.)
"I got seed catalogs for pictures of flowers, just
like he did," she continued, "plus children's coloring
books. It hit me how incredibly facile he was with all
this. Because it's hard! Putting 47 figures into one
composition, that's not an easy task."

The mixture of Mr. Wellman's text, taken from Darger's
writings, and Ms. Olinder's visuals, supplemented with
short films by Bill Morrison and a multitiered set by
Fred Tietz, all swirl around the actor Daniel Zippi,
who plays Darger, and the seven actresses portraying
the Vivian Girls. Similarly swirling is Julia Wolfe's
music, an electronic, postmodernist pastiche of
haunting children's choruses and churchlike motets
interwoven with songs in early music hall styles,
composed and sung by Cynthia Hopkins.

The full title of the piece is "Jennie Richee (or
Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe)," but what does
it mean? "Jennie Richee," Mr. McGrath said, is the
hideout for the Vivian Girls during the war — "their
safe spot, their haven." As for the subtitle, Mr.
Wellman said he cribbed the phrase from Darger, who
wrote the words onto one of his paintings. What they
mean, Mr. Wellman added, is anyone's guess.

The show has been reworked since its last, even
briefer appearance in New York, at the Kitchen in
April 2001, where it won an Obie. (The world premiere
was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in
February 2001.) "Some parts will be entirely
different," Mr. McGrath said. "For example, there was
a section where we really just created tableaus from
the paintings, that I didn't like. It was too
meditative. So I asked Julia to compose new music, and
we brought in the choreographer David Parsons to make
that section his own. Now I hope it will be much more
chaotic."

Ms. Olinder said that she believed that the latest
incarnation had been altered in a more fundamental
way. "I felt we didn't touch on the violence toward
women as much as we might have the last time," she
explained. "We're approaching it more head-on. The
energy in his work does seem more toward violence than
sexuality. When you look at the art, erotic it's not."

As a woman, did Ms. Olinder find Darger's vision
disturbing? 

"I don't know," she said. "I'm so bowled over by the
beauty of his images, the facility of his hand. I
obviously find the really violent stuff extremely
perplexing; he was a very disturbed person. But I
don't think he acted on any of this stuff. He had to
have been way too busy. I feel that's where he placed
all that awful energy — in the art."

Mr. Wellman said his view of Darger was not that
complicated: "There is a side of Darger that is very
dark. But misogynistic? I don't think so. I think his
was a very clear-eyed view of the hell humanity
creates for itself. There are also a huge number of
images of paradise alongside the little-girl
bloodletting. I think he was both things. He seems
scary because there is a grandeur to the violence
that's repellent to most right-thinking people. But I
don't see him celebrating it. He just doesn't run away
from it, where we tend to avert our gaze."

He paused. "I think Darger was actually a profound
moralist."   

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/arts/theater/12SING.html

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