Opening last weekend at Joe’s Pub, Anything That Gives Off Light is an earnest, well-intentioned piece that is augmented with several original songs. Its fictional story considers the historical and social similarities shared by working class people who exist in the hardscrabble Highlands of Scotland and in the Appalachian coal mining communities of West Virginia.
A collaborative project involving six writers plus a songwriting duo, the show is a co-production by the TEAM, a Brooklyn-based ensemble devoted to creating works about the experience of living in America today, and the National Theatre of Scotland, a theater-without-walls company that won acclaim for its memorable Black Watch.
What’s more, Anything That Gives Off Light has been directed by Rachel Chavkin, one among its writers, known best for helming Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. First seen in 2016 at the Edinburgh International Festival, this latest iteration of the piece (already presented on tour in several U.S. locations) is being staged by Davey Anderson, another of its writers and a National Theatre of Scotland associate. That’s because Chavkin currently is busy directing the Broadway production of the musical Hadestown.
Many people have worked on Anything That Gives Off Light, so it’s curious that the show itself turns out to be quite modest in scale, performed by three actors plus three musicians. There is virtually no scenery.
The story is set in a London pub, where Brian (Reuben Joseph), a young-ish Scottish man living in the city, encounters Red (Jessica Almasy), an American tourist from West Virginia who has been inspired by the Outlander TV series to visit Scotland.
They are joined by Iain (Martin Donaghy), Brian’s longtime chum, who arrives with the cremains of Brian’s beloved grandmother tucked inside a whiskey tin. Brian is expected to bury or scatter these ashes somewhere appropriate in Scotland and why exactly Iain has brought them down to London is unclear.
Anyway, the three of them travel to a part of Scotland where the locals like Brian’s late grandma suffer from economic oppression today. Then they head off to Red’s part of West Virginia where everybody suffers from economic oppression today—and also go back in time to 1700, which apparently wasn’t much nicer, except that strip mining had not yet destroyed the land.
But in actuality these people never leave the London pub. It’s a metaphysical journey. Or is it?
Frankly, I couldn’t figure it out. For a show called Anything That Gives Off Light, everything seems awfully hazy.
Amid its unclear perimeters, this messy, misty narrative deals out plenty of compare-and-contrast talk about disadvantaged people in Scotland and Appalachia, national identity, emigration, gun control, social activism, ecological disaster, and similarly serious topics. There are also several foot-stomping folk-rock songs by Shaun and Abigail Bengson (Hundred Days) rendered upon fiddle, guitar, percussion and accordion. The songs, at least, are lively and they are brightly performed by a trio of musician-singers led by a smoky-voiced Maya Sharpe. The rest of the show is scarcely so entertaining.
Ultimately, I found this event to be as didactic and tiresome as it evidently is terribly sincere. Too many creative thumbprints are smeared all over this project and they have obscured the story’s ultimate point. Whatever made this piece dynamic and dramatic in 2016 at Edinburgh, where it is said to have won favorable reviews, has vanished in the sea-change to New York.
Making this production even less viable is some lackluster acting. The cramped circumstances of the performance space at Joe’s Pub limit staging and visual opportunities. Joe’s Pub also happens to be an inappropriate venue for this event: A joint where a burger is priced at $21 and a modest glass of wine goes for $17 is no place for a show that bewails the pains of economic oppression.
