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player ready...It’s Thanksgiving, 1978. Horrifying images of the Jonestown massacre flood the airwaves. But in Dousman, Wisconsin, smaller-scale sorrows and unspoken nightmares fill the chilly air. In “Black River Falls,” Bryn Magnus’ new play for Curious Theatre Branch, there is a definite feeling of stasis about to explode into chaos – fitting for the economic disruptions and 1960s hangover of the Carter years.
The title may be familiar to many as the locale made famous by Michael Lesy’s 1973 book (which was turned into a poetic documentary film in 1999), “Wisconsin Death Trip.” Lesy went back to an earlier period of disruption – the 1890s, which were marked in Black River Falls by a series of murders, suicides, arson and other bizarre tragedies.
Magnus, one of the founding members of Curious who has been living in New York for the past several years, has usually specialized in cerebral/surreal evocations that straddle the border between the mundane and the fantastical. 2001’s “Love Horse,” for example, featured an orthodontist who finds his life transformed by Butoh. Given those roots, it’s interesting to see Magnus (who, along with his sister and director, Jenny Magnus, grew up in small-town Wisconsin) working in an almost defiantly naturalistic vein.
Gary (John Machesky), a sullen teen, has returned early from a hunting trip to Black River Falls after getting a premonition about his bookish younger sister, Laurie (Maci Greenberg). Dad (Matt Rieger) drinks beer and watches football, avoiding talking about either his troubled daughter or his dead wife. The local tavern, the Lighthouse, provides little respite, as it is dominated by loudmouth Tom Dabney (Stephen Walker, in a gloriously excessive performance), who can’t stop telling the story of the night in 1968 when he met Jefferson Airplane. (His claims of actually writing “White Rabbit” that night are suspect, inasmuch as that song came out a year earlier – but his short-fused temper suggests that fact checking him would be inadvisable.)
Through the course of the evening, Gary goes back and forth in encounters with Colleen (Diane McNulty), who lost her dad to cancer. His fumbling attempts to explain Alan Watts’ ideas about Eastern philosophy amuse and confound her in equal measure.
But the person truly lost in the haze of pot, beer and inchoate longings is Greenberg’s frail Laurie, who has just gone through a possibly violent awakening to the betrayals that adult relationships have in store for her.
Magnus’ play succeeds at capturing the broken dialogue and false bravado of teenagers while also hinting at their vulnerability and desire for answers to the big questions. It’s the kind of potent mixture that can drive hundreds of young people to follow a megalomaniac into the jungle – or that can drive one broken-hearted girl to exact a startling revenge.
REVIEW: Black River Falls by Curious Theatre Branch
3 STARS
Through July 26, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston Ave.; $15 or pay what you can, curioustheatrebranch.com.