Donny Stixx (Harry Farmer) gets ready for a magical night in New York premiere of Philip Ridley play (photo by Hunter Canning)
TONIGHT WITH DONNY STIXX / DARK VANILLA JUNGLE
HERE SubletSeries
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
Through February 7, $25 each show, $40 for both
212-352-3101
www.here.org
Near the beginning of Tonight with Donny Stixx, one of two companion Philip Ridley one-person plays running in repertory at Here through February 7, Stixx (Harry Farmer) says to the audience, “I am here to entertain you. Expect to be surprised. Expect to be amazed. But most of all . . . expect the unexpected.” Tonight with Donny Stixx and Dark Vanilla Jungle, a pair of powerful, confrontational, poignant monologues, offer all that and more as they get right in your face and put you on edge. In Tonight with Donny Stixx, which premiered last August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Farmer stars as the title character, a fifteen-year-old boy with dreams of becoming a famous magician. In Dark Vanilla Jungle, which premiered in August 2013 at the fringe, Robyn Kerr stars as Andrea, a fifteen-year-old girl with dreams of love and romance. Shifting between the past and the present, going from a hopeful, positive future to sudden, curse-filled outbursts, Donny and Andrea prance around Steven C. Kemp’s claustrophobic stage design, a cagelike set with one metallic chair, resembling either a jail cell or a police interrogation room. Neither actor ever ventures outside the fourteen-by-fourteen-square tiled floor, as if there are imaginary bars on the three sides where the audience sits; at the back is a grid of twenty-eight large, exposed lightbulbs, which designer Dante Olivia Smith uses to flash such shapes as a cross and shine sharply into the audience’s eyes. Donny and Andrea often address audience members directly, pointing at them and asking for their opinion or a reminder of what they were talking about, but while a nod or a shake of the head is okay, it’s best not to answer them verbally. “Where was all this heading?” Andrea asks. “Don’t tell me!”
Andrea (Robyn Kerr) shares her mesmerizing tale in Philip Ridley’s DARK VANILLA JUNGLE (photo by Hunter Canning)
The similarities between the two New York premieres, being presented for the first time ever together — Donny Stixx is directed by Frances Loy for the Ferment Theatre, while Jungle is directed by Paul Takacs for the Shop — extend to both style and narrative substance. Both mentally troubled, disillusioned youths were raised in dysfunctional working-class families in the East End of London, where they go to the same mall, and each has apparently committed a terrible and shocking, ripped-from-the-headlines crime. Retreating ever deeper into their fantasy worlds, they both also have tentative relationships with the truth. “EVERYONE LIES! EVERYONE LIES! EVERYONE LIES!” Donny angrily repeats, while Andrea offers a more gentle, “But men lie, don’t they?” The two performances are absolutely electrifying; the twenty-three-year-old London-born, Los Angeles-based Farmer and the thirty-six-year-old Jamaican-born, Long Island City-based Kerr grab you from the start and never let go for eighty unnerving, exhilarating, unrelenting minutes. As is true with many of Ridley’s plays, the audience is essentially part of the show, trapped in the theater, with no easy route out while the play is going on — and yes, people have been known to want to head for the exits early because of the controversial playwright’s often violent subject matter. In the New Group’s 2015 revival of Mercury Fur at the Signature, there was no intermission despite the two-hour length, so in order to leave before the end of the show, which included the torture of a child, you had to basically walk across the set, right past the actors; the same was true of Takacs’s 2012 production of Tender Napalm at 59E59, which took place in a small, narrow space between two horizontal rows of people in a tiny theater. But Ridley, who is also a film director, screenwriter, poet, lyricist, and children’s book author, writes with such skill and intelligence, and the acting and direction is so impeccable, that you shouldn’t even entertain the possibility of leaving before the end of either of these incendiary works; in any case, you might be too scared to get up out of your seat anyway.