A visit to the Bushwick Starr is a bit like falling down the rabbit hole, beginning with the journey there on the L train. The small theatre is located in a tenement-like apartment building reached by a dingy set of stairs, down a hallway, passing a sign that reads "Out of respect for our neighbors please keep volume to the minimum while hanging out in the hallway " and through a door into a darkly lit room. We are here to see Clare Barron's latest work, culled from her diary. When last I saw one of her plays it was the brilliant "You Got Older," in my opinion, along with Ann Washburn's "10 Out of 12," one of the two best plays of 2015, both reviewed on this blog. Now Barron dares to go deeper.
I'm sure that many of us kept diaries when we 16. Perhaps we destroyed these diaries later in life out of embarrassment. Thank God Clare Barron did not. "I'll Never Love Again," her diary from that year, recounts her sexual awaking as told by a literal chorus of actors, all Clare, through monologues and group performances of tunes like "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond." We feel the angst of a 16 year old girl through these many lenses. It is raw; it is painful; it is joyous.
And what an oddly assorted array of actors we have here. There is an extraordinarily tall man with a shaved head and red beard, a middle aged Asian woman, a pop-eyed young woman with Mamie Eisenhower bangs and a voluptuous African-American. These are only a few of those who make up the cast, each startlingly different from each other. While I hesitate to single out individual performances, I have to note those of Nanah Mensah, Kate Benson, Mia Katigbak and Clare Barron herself who engages in the most excruciating and real deflowering I have seen on stage or screen.
Cut to 2012, Clare at 26 played by Nanah Mensah is an office worker. We are introduced to the 14 year old Oona (a fine Oona Montandon) who has come to meet her mom's partner who is taking her to an event celbrating the Mayan Apolcalypse, a phenomenon with which Clare's younger self had been obsessed. Clare unsuccessfully tries to advise and encourage Oona on how to cope with high school and adolescence (because we know so well how Clare fared with that). And then on to a monologue by the middle-aged actress Mia Katigbak as the 26-year-old Clare describing a time in which "things fell apart" in her life and, it would seem, in the world at large. But in the end she says, "Each year I understood more songs." And so goes the world of Clare Barron.
The inspired direction is by Michael Leibenluft; Stephanie Johnstone is the show's composer and music director, and the Alice in Wonderland-like set is by Carolyn Mraz.
