Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I first read of Henry Darger in Thomas Dyja’s wonderful book on Chicago culture, The Third Coast. As I remember, he was covered a few pages away from Dyja’s account of Vivian Maier, the street photographer who was acknowledged a master only after she died and someone found a trove of her astonishing work in a storage bin. Darger’s work, too, was discovered after his death – countless written pages of an epic novel and God knows how many illustrations.

There’s a key difference. Maier’s work is immediately accessible. The images of ordinary Chicagoans frozen in moments in their daily lives instantly trigger speculation and the odd sly laugh. She may have been severe and off-putting in her personal dealings (she bears more than a passing resemblance to Mary Shepard’s illustrations of Mary Poppins), but her pictures radiate a palpable sense of empathy. In her best work, you sense the souls of her subjects.

Maier looked out. Darger was locked inside himself. He obsessively cranked out countless illustrations of thin, pre-pubescent girls endangered by evil men. The girls sometimes have wings, sometimes horns. Sometimes they are combined with animals, sometimes they are naked. The pictures are often simultaneously intoxicating and disturbing.

Bughouse is a theatrical piece with a text fashioned from Darger’s writings by playwright Beth Henley and directed by Martha Clarke. It is a monologue, performed by John Kelly at the Vineyard Theater. It is given visual goosing by projections by John Narun and animation by Ruth Lingford. Much of this is intriguing, but …

I never felt a desire to find out anything about Darger. The characterization makes him appear to drift in and out of rationality. Since no significant interaction with others is depicted, there is little sense of the strategies he must have used to sustain a life outside an institution. This undercuts potential for drama.

Chatting with a friend after the show, we found ourselves speculating that our non-artist friends and family members might view us as more-functional versions of Darger. He’s a director and I’m a playwright, and we’re not unfamiliar with people from the civilian world observing us with bemusement. In their view, we have to be some kind of nuts to pursue this obsession with telling stories on a stage for so little money, right?

And we couldn’t help but speculate on the relationship between Darger’s evident mental condition and the images he created. His art casts a spell. Does it matter if it is the product of his talent or the product of his illness?

Ultimately, this brief evening (a little over an hour) feels more like an installation than a fully-realized piece of theater.