That’s a Holocaust reference,” barks director/performer Phelim McDermott in a gruff Brooklyn accent. He is recalling his meeting with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. McDermott and his friend and collaborator, the composer Philip Glass, are in Sendak’s art-filled Connecticut house to discuss a possible adaptation of the author’s later book In The Night Kitchen. Sendak is describing the scene in which his naked boy hero is nearly baked in an oven.
The story might herald a show about the horror that lies behind many children’s stories, a theme brilliantly explored by Shockheaded Peter that McDermott co-created nearly 30 years ago. But the Sendak encounter is here just one of many instances plucked by McDermott from his life in the theatre and his productions of Glass’s operas. Given equal weight are the director’s formative experiences as a boy watching theatre, including Laurence Olivier’s Shylock at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
First appearing as a bemused member of the audience, McDermott’s highly personal show is packed with events that have formed a productive life in theatre and also the eclectic interests that have excited McDermott’s intellect, such as Taoism and the work of Arnold Mindell who taught his followers about the three levels of consciousness. Supported by a team of puppeteers and a six-piece band who play the characteristically repetitive and mesmeric score that Glass wrote for the show, the evening is a flow of thoughts, stories and ideas. Yet co-director Kirsty Housley fails to prevent McDermott from turning his homage to Glass and theatre making into a self-indulgent affair. Just when the show appears to be approaching the levels of invention you might expect from the visionary company Complicité (with whom Housley has worked), the show dwells for too long on a memory that clearly means a lot to McDermott but theatrically delivers less than it promises.
Pacing energetically around the circular stage McDermott compares Glass’s music to a river that has run through the director’s life since he repeatedly playing his first album Glass Works as a boy, much to the parents’ distraction. Yet this is a river with an undercurrent of vanity.
The puppet of a boy who doubles as Sendak’s creation and McDermott’s own son is very moving. But the tableaux created by McDermott and his puppeteers in a whirlwind of frenetic ostentatious creativity falls short of the ta-da moment the show thinks it has achieved.
Still, fans of Glass will have their reward. The composer’s own idea of being represented on stage by a special Steinway that faithfully replays his own performance works eerily well. But McDermott needs to submit himself to a ruthless editor.
Tao of Glass
@Soho Place
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