Even the word sounds spellbinding: “Incantata” is Italian for “enchantment.”
Leave it to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, in his poem-turned-play of that name, to use all the linguistic tools at his disposal to remind us that the sumptuousness of language is as much a matter of sound as of meaning.
“Incantata,” which appears in Muldoon’s 1994 collection “The Annals of Chile,” is an elegy to his partner, Mary Farl Powers, a noted printmaker who died two years earlier. Remembrances of their time together are twined with allusions to Greek and Irish mythology, popular music (Vivaldi to Frankie Valli) and “Waiting for Godot.”
In the Irish Repertory Theater’s heady and demanding production of the same name, the veteran actor Stanley Townsend is the unnamed speaker of the poem, reciting it to a video camera as a message to a lost love. (The hourlong show, a U.S. premiere, originated at the Galway International Arts Festival.)
Recites, however, is the wrong word, reserved for a library or classroom; Townsend proclaims and concedes, utters and professes. Under Sam Yates’s direction, he is constantly in motion, utilizing the whole of the stage. Swift shifts in lighting and video projections of his anguished face, projected on the back wall, provide ample planes through which to reflect the various dimensions of the poem.
There’s the romance of quiet scenes, when Townsend pauses between stanzas, simply looking up at the whisper of light streaming in from a high vent, as if seeing a familiar ghost. (Paul Keogan did the lighting.) Then moments of tumult, when the actor erupts in a frenzied dance to a Blondie song or fitfully flings buckets of paint onto the walls.
Ultimately, Muldoon’s writing is more rooted on the page, where its coy references and ludic associative leaps can be contemplated slowly. The stage, for all the liveliness it breathes into the text, is not as amenable.
Between the speaker’s direct reckonings with his grief (“I thought of you again tonight, thin as a rake”) are oceans of verbal bric-a-brac, tickles to the ear and intellect, but hard to grasp.
Muldoon wrote “Incantata” in conversation with some of his other poetry. Though the minute details of this exercise are lost on the stage, other formal elements of the work, like repetition and sound play, are still arresting and profound.
And for those able to pay close enough attention, the play is full of lyrical rewards: “You must have heard the music/rise from the muddy ground between/your breasts as a nocturne,” Townsend rhapsodizes at one point.
Yet there’s a tension between the strict formal architecture and the unfettered content. We are asked to consider whether the logic of an art form can capture the illogicality of grief: “I thought again of how art may be made,” the man says.
We see him doing just that: obsessively cutting up and dipping potatoes in paint, stamping them onto scrolls of paper. Rosanna Vize’s set design, a cluttered art space with prints featuring the same pattern littering the walls, embodies the attempt to combat chaos by creating meaning.
“Incantata” is unique and beautiful, but undeniably complex. The poem is worth reading, for sure, but its life onstage has a peculiar charm, a touch of magic.
Incantata
Through March 15 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; 212-727-2737, irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
