“Judevine” is a living poem, pumping art through arterial riffs on humble life, capillaries quickening with the ennoblement of literature’s deified reality. Directed by Kerry Stinson (’08) for the Theater Department’s “Second Season” series, the performance captures moments of concrete humanness as it battles with the pure poetry of David Budbill’s script. Stinson’s fleshy world gives the poetry its poeticism by anchoring contemplative musings in the context of a real world. By viewing “Judevine,” one discovers how to appreciate poetry.
Stinson’s production is eloquently complemented by original music composed by Peter Andre (’08) and Jesse DelGizzi (’08). Inspired by original music for a play he saw in London, Andre approached Stinson about the collaboration with the objective of creating music that would fuse organically with the memory created by “Judevine” - as opposed to using popular music that is tangled with earlier memories. Andre and DelGizzi succeed in this successful, voicing the rustic simplicity of “Judevine” with mild-mannered folk guitar.
“Judevine” centers around a poet named David who lives in a small Vermont mountain town where he writes about the people he meets. This is fiction only in the strictest definition, as the real David Budbill wrote a collection of poems drawing on his experiences living on a remote hillside in Northern Vermont. The play is based on the book of poetry of the same name. Eschewing traditional narrative, the play is a show-and-tell of chafed and scabby lives narrated by the “fictitious” protagonist.
Chad Murla (’08) plays David, whose intellectual affection for the world around him oscillates beautifully between appreciation of thickly calloused peopled and bourgeois fetishism of hardship. Pushing and scratching at this line provides the thematic conflict of the play, and Murla’s double casting as the wild-eyed Vietnam vet Tommy puts a fine point on the self-conscious concept of artist as historian and cataloguer versus exploiter and arbiter. Murla excels at seamlessly shifting between - and connecting " the two characters whom he plays. Tommy embraces lumpy, uneven people with his body over his mind. David, on the other hand, is almost gleefully in love with the idea of suffering, seen as he goads Grace, his lover, to recite the most painful story of her life. Every time David is at his desk, he portrays his love of the idea of people as much as the concrete actors of daily life. Murla’s self-aware smile holds these contradictions well throughout his speeches to the audience.
The poster slogan that reads, “Judevine is imaginary. Only the people are real,” rightly emphasizes the variety of humanity portrayed. A particular strength of Budbill’s script is exposing the allure of misshapen lives. Stinson grounds us immediately in that reality with her opening collage of actors, uniformed in snug white t-shirts and blue jeans. These are imperfect specimens, slender men and roundly sloping women, mocking underwear models with the raw, unprocessed diversity of life. They take on the costumes of different characters and diverge from standardized myths of beauty and happiness, which is as striking to the audience as it is to David. The image of these people bare on stage embodies nature failing to meet our fundamental expectations of equality and beauty.
All the actors in “Judevine” play more than one character, but none, beyond Murla, capture the spiritual relationship between two distinct people better than Chelsea Cottle (’11) and Kathryn Dalby (’11). Cottle’s depictions of Grace and Lucy - a struggling single mother with a disturbing secret and a dithering woman cracked with grief - draw a tragic line from the struggle to stay afloat in a difficult life to an exhausted slip beneath the waves. Dalby’s Bobby, a doe eyed woman whose gaze captures earned fear of life’s unpleasantness, matures into a gentle acceptance of life in Ann, a serene septuagenarian who inspires hippies looking for a simple life.
Brett Roth (’08) cackles with zany energy as Antoine, the idiosyncratically accented laborer who has the closest relationship with David. Roth is Jim Carrey funny, a bizarre chemical element threatening to blow up the whole science experiment - but also more exciting than anything else onstage. His appearances are the most fun the play allows, but they sometimes distracts from the production’s message as a whole.
Maggie Seegers (’10) as Edith, Andrew Collie (’11) as Jerry and Lindsay Crane (’08) as Alice also give “Judevine” the strong characterizations that make it a play about people.
“Judevine” is a dreamer’s vision of small-time life. If you like poetry, or think you might, give it a try. “Judevine” will be presented on March 27 to 29 at 8 p.m., as well as at 2 p.m. on March 29, in PBK Hall’s Lab Theater.