A surreal study in sorrow, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is an adaptation of Max Porter’s 2015 novella by Irish playwright and director Enda Walsh. Opening on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the show comes directly from the Barbican Theatre in London, where it received considerable acclaim.
Indisputably this mad, murky, melancholy drama is a fine showcase for Cillian Murphy, who delivers a tour-de-force performance as a deeply grieving man.
However, anyone who plans to see the play had better take some time to read Porter’s work or at least brush up on English poet Ted Hughes’ Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, a collection of narrative poems regarding a mythological being, which is integral to the story.
Without such prior knowledge, the challenging Grief is the Thing with Feathers may well prove to be a mystifying, at times even bewildering, event. The non-linear text is a complex and writerly collage of memories, emotions, and fanciful happenings. For the most part, Walsh’s production is purposefully chaotic.
The contemporary individual whom Murphy depicts, known as Dad, is a scruffy professor of literature who is writing a treatise on Ted Hughes. Desolate in the immediate wake of his wife’s sudden death, his anguish magnified by worry about his two young sons, Dad is nearly paralyzed with grief. A storm howls outside, suggesting the devastation within their home.
Then the family is visited by Hughes’ character of Crow, who soon moves in with them.
A vast and shape-shifting anthropomorphic presence—a storyteller, a philosopher, and a trickster—the Crow intermittently possesses Dad—more for better than for worse—and this spirit helps the man and his boys gradually work through their bereavement.
Sometimes speaking anxiously as Dad, sometimes detachedly narrating this story in the third person, Murphy also assumes the booming, eerily powerful bass voice of Crow (boosted by electronic distortion). Wearing a long black robe over corduroys and a jersey, Murphy flips its hoodie over his head whenever he takes on Crow’s persona.
Meanwhile, the creature’s visual awesomeness at times is blown up to stage-blotting blackness through Will Duke’s projection design, which also deals out words in cursive and typewritten characters, elegant sepia illustrations of Crow’s world, and later brings color images into the bleak, disorderly stage picture. Designer Jamie Vartan’s stylized setting for the family’s home presents a huge, loft-like space where the major furniture is Dad’s desk on one side and the boys’ bunkbed on the other. Scattered papers, foodstuffs, toys, and paraphernalia litter the space as the drama progresses in an often disorienting manner over 90 minutes.
While Murphy’s intensely physical, emotional performance as Dad and magical evocation of Crow dominates the production, he is not alone. David Evans and Leo Hart quietly yet distinctly portray the sons whose pains also are eased by Crow’s presence. Subsequently, the boys briefly reappear in adult clothes and mustaches to talk about their lives in future years with their own families and to relate how their father’s later life worked out.
A project presented by Wayward Production in association with Complicité, Walsh’s intricate staging of the play is enhanced by technical excellence. In addition to the contributions by the designers previously mentioned, Adam Silverman’s mostly crepuscular lighting and especially Helen Atkinson’s multi-layered sound design, along with composer Teho Teardo’s often agitated music, contribute to the production’s vivid nature.
If Grief is the Thing with Feathers proves to be a demanding, nearly exhausting experience, it also can be a rewarding one for theatergoers willing and able to hang on through such a stormy ride.
