Dis-Spirit-ed

Pontine Movement Theatre presents PBS for the stage

By Robert Von Stein Redick

Voices of the Spirit Land plays through March 11 at the Pontine Movement Theatre in Portsmouth.
Call (603) 436-6660.

NOT ENOUGH PUNCH: Greg Gathers and M. Marguerite Mathews don’t exactly conjure the Blair Witch in Voices from the Spirit Land.

As a critic, I am forced to spurn the gospel admonition to Judge Not: it would put me swiftly out of business. Yet I do adhere to a certain low-carat golden rule, drilled into me by years among writers of spectacular neuroses: to judge art, as far as humanly possible, on the terms it poses for itself. In the case of theater, this means considering how well a play manages to be what it wants to be, rather than what you think it should. The ethic is as simple as they come, but like so many commandments, it’s not easy to keep.

To all appearances, Voices From the Spirit Land, an original production of the Pontine Movement Theater, wants to be a PBS documentary. The evening’s subjects are ghosts and ghostliness in 19th century New England; the medium is a three-part pastiche of lecture, puppetry, and recitations from Walt Whitman. There are some differences: public television is never so tactful, its scenes never so gracefully choreographed — yet it does tend to knit its impressionistic scraps together before they broadcast, and offers a hint of their cultural significance. Not so Pontine: from the moment the lights come up we are plunged into a fast and furious account of the clairvoyant exploits of the Fox sisters, who channeled the likes of Napoleon and Princess Pocahontas to the amazement of their Shaker townsfolk, and went on to become a national sensation.

An account, did I say? Well, it was a bit more than that: the sisters’s ghostly encounters are staged, if that is the right word, upon a “toy theater” of doubtless period authenticity, using paper cutouts of fine pen-and-ink drawings on sticks. Occasionally these are made to jiggle and jump; mostly they are still. The whole apparatus is about the size of a large computer screen — fortunately this Portsmouth theater is a small one.

The performers, M. Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers, certainly make the most of the space they have. To the right of the Punch-and-Judy window hang three enormous beige veils, behind which is eventually revealed a gorgeous woodland scene, complete with trembling leaves and bulrushes. It is here that we wander with Walt, and Walt’s female alter-ego, reciting some of the more luscious passages of Leaves of Grass: “the hairy wild-bee,” that “grips the full-grown lady flower,” is hiding somewhere in that glade, as is “the young man that wakes, deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master him.” The American bard was preeminently a poet of tactile, sensual life. When he evoked death, it was to remind us that even a corpse “is palpable as the living are palpable.” Whitman had little use for ghosts, and so this encounter with his poetry blurs rather than advances the production’s themes. But it sure is sexy.

Finally there is the dramatization, enacted with far more bashful Victorian puppets, of a ghost story by Henry James, The Friend of the Friend. These at least are three-dimensional, and nearly a yard tall: two ladies and a gentleman engaged in a lethally proper courtship which even death cannot accelerate. These are quasi-Bunraku puppets, manipulated in plain view by the artists, but their tiny movements do not conjure up much of the gravitas associated with the Japanese form. They simply appear to have trouble finding things to say to one another: an awkward condition, since the artists have chosen a story occurring entirely at tea. No, the cups do not rattle, the curtains do not toss: in fact the ghost is only spoken of, in scenes that do not actually transpire. At several points the puppets do stand up.

How, then, to observe my golden rule, when it is so hard to deduce just what Mathews and Gathers have in mind? Theirs is a theater of gesture and slight effects, of understatement, of historical modeling. Refreshing as such mature purposes are in a world whose most-seen show is a fluffy Phantom, they do not easily make up for so complete a lack of narrative urgency. This need not take the form of Blair Witch horrors, of dripping Ghostbusters slime-scenes — nor even dramatic conflict, safe and certain tonic that it is. A passionate inquiry, posed tangibly and coherently, could do as much to give shape to the evening. Such a question is latent in Voices, but too distantly: we could benefit from hearing it aloud. As things stand, audiences may wonder why they ordered this cocktail of one part lecture, one part arthritic fable, and one part strolling Song of Myself.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.