Dael Orlandersmith’s Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance is a multimedia journey into fate and destiny (photo © HanJie Chow)
SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Through March 9, $50, 7:00
www.rattlestick.org
In Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic The Divine Comedy, Publius Virgilius Maro, better known simply as Virgil, shepherds the Italian poet through the “Inferno” and “Purgatory,” two of the three realms of the dead. “Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, / And lead thee hence through the eternal place, / Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations, / Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate, / Who cry out each one for the second death,” Virgil, who represents human reason, says to Dante. Virgil (70–19 BCE) was the author of The Aeneid, which tells the story of Trojan War hero and refugee Aeneas’s journey toward his fate and destiny.
In Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, solo show master Dael Orlandersmith portrays a fictional character named Virgil who takes the audience at the Rattlestick Theater on a sixty-minute multimedia odyssey into death and destiny, fate and fulfillment.
The mood is set early, with such songs as Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover “Hurt” and Mavis Staples’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” playing as the crowd enters the space, giving it a holy feel. Takeshi Kata’s set features six floor-to-ceiling string-curtained cylinders containing furniture: a chair, a table, a lamp on a stand. We soon learn that each one symbolizes a chapter in Virgil’s own epic narrative as they try to find their place in a world complicated by loss and loneliness.
“Have I done it right?” Virgil asks. “Have I used time — my time — right?” Have any of us?
Virgil wanders from cylinder to cylinder, sharing moments from their past. They grew up in the Bronx, hanging out at Woodlawn Cemetery and going to St. Barnabas. Their parents’ love of music led Virgil to become a deejay at a pirate radio station in the East Village. As the years pass, Virgil realizes they need something more. “I make a decision to make more money / Move to another part of downtown / Because / That must be the answer / Me / Thinking the money / Another place / Has got to be the answer,” they explain, but it takes their mother’s unexpected death and their father’s sudden illness for Virgil to take a long look at their life, significantly influenced by their friendship with funeral director Jimmy McHugh and hospice nurse Peggy Callahan.
Dael Orlandersmith looks at her past and future in beautiful one-person show at Rattlestick (photo © HanJie Chow)
Born in East Harlem, Orlandersmith has been staging one-person dramas, some semiautobiographical, most featuring the playwright performing multiple characters, since 1995’s Beauty’s Daughter, which earned her an Obie. She won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2003 for Yellowman. More recently, Forever was a deeply intimate show about the severely dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic mother, while Until the Flood explored the tragic story of the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.
Orlandersmith is masterful in Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, a beautifully rendered production lovingly directed by Neel Keller, who has been working with Orlandersmith for four decades. As Orlandersmith says at one point in the play, it’s a “celebration of life and death.” She doesn’t make major shifts in tone or body as she switches among the characters, always wearing the same all-black outfit (the costume is by Kaye Voyce) as she walks slowly around the cylinders, which have a heavenly glow (the sensitive lighting is by Mary Louise Geiger), the people they represent prepared for the great beyond. Nicholas Hussong’s projections include leaves blowing in the wind and the subway speeding by, accompanied by Lindsay Jones’s tender original music and sound.
As Virgil discovers their true vocation, it’s like they have been given a giant hug from the universe, something we all seek — and something we all receive from Orlandersmith in this gently, enveloping experience. You’ll leave the theater thinking of the words Peggy shared with Virgil: “Live your life / Live it fully / Do not leave here regretfully.”
Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance continues at Rattlestick through March 9; the March 6 performance will be followed by the discussion “Music Lives On” with Javier Arau, Felice Rosser, Elliot Sharp, and Matt Stapleton.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]