Vesper
There’s no wrong way to find yourself.
There is literally no way to talk about Vesper, conceived and directed by Jarod Hanson, up now at The Voxel, without acknowledging the show’s incredible achievement in terms of technical design; it’s the kind of production that will be studied later, and should be. This is what happens when design is not layered onto an already existent directorial vision, but is instead concurrently birthed, twins. Lights from John McAfee don’t illuminate, they witness, sound, music and multimedia from Jason Charney builds rooms, sonic rasaboxes that both transform and propel. Set from Joe Martin is flexible, allowed to breathe by necessity, now a ship, now a bedroom, now a field of stars. Each piece, from a gleaming moon somehow containing a be-feathered goddess, to a hell, prickly, uncomfortable, to a sunrise of relief, is so intentional, so incredibly orchestrated, that it comes back around to feeling easy. What a tremendous success.
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But then, the entire production is like that, showing the fingerprints of so many artists who have given, deeply, of themselves to create it. Vesper is a tapestry, a non-linear, non-narrative piece that is less a play and more a playlist, vignettes that string together like pearls, a meditation on sleep, and dreams, and whatever happens in between. Don’t worry about what it means, worry about what it taps. Vesper invokes deep longing, and fear, of a collective unconscious. Archetypes dance across the stage, The Mother, The Child, The Lovers, The Heretic, The Witch, The Warrior. Hanson seems to suggest that perhaps there is a single source for these, a sort of common River Styx that we need only to slip off to slip into, and that our tales, and stories, and stars, and all of it, might flow from the same weird spring. Myths and monsters are ritualistically conjured here, I especially liked a curious sequence of fairy lights, illuminating the path, that spoke of will-o’-the-wisps, and a giant, hooded psychopomp on its way back to the land of the dead.
The ensemble is strong. Alix Fenhagen, Ally Ibach, Molly Margulies, Parker Matthews, Luu Pham, Chelsea Thaler, Hailey Withrow and Matthew Williams create a single, breathing, morphing organism. They share everything, the stage, the breath, from time to time, a limb or two. This singularity of purpose helps to focus things, we might not exactly know what’s happening, but they (at least, one of them) does, I’m almost sure of it. These are performers who have given of their personal experiences to build this piece; graceful, lithe, glowing with a strikingly transparent, aching, oh-so-human vulnerability that grounds the show even in its most alien of moments.
Vesper is most successful when it leans into these nearly supernatural concurrences, flashes that are so specific that they paradoxically, and spookily, seem the most universal. The conversations one has with friends as it gets near bed, for example, the proximity of the sleepscape a nearly irresistible pull to say the fucking wildest of things that you will barely remember, but still seem so important to convey. It is less so when it goes too general, vague, with a kind of “we are all made of stardust” Childlike Empress vibe, a discordant note that can stray a twinge corny, like a version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that’s a bit on the nose. Still, these moments are rare, there is more truth here than platitude.
Vesper streaks across the stage a celestial object, a long, long time in the making but such a short burst in front of our eyes. It’s true that “nothing makes us feel like stargazing does,” but this…this comes close. A unique, exquisite little rumination of a show that is raising the bar once again on a very strong season on the Baltimore small stage.
Vesper plays at The Voxel through November 2nd. Tickets and more information here.
