Bully Dance

Watching "Bully Dance" by David Valdes Greenwood was like going to church. Inevitably you'll take that as a bad thing. You'll think I'm saying the play was boring or sanctimonious. Or you'll call me an infidel for comparing a play (something base and terrestrial) with something you hold sacred.

Well, take a minute to compose yourself, and accept the fact that the theatre is something sacred to me. Though we've tried our damnedest to homogenize it and de-god-ify it, the theatre was born in religious ceremony. Even before the Greeks first performed tragedies in the religious Festival of Dionysis, primitive man re-enacted the successful hunt, taking on the visage of the elk or the bear that they had just killed in order to honor the soul of the animal and assure successful hunting in the future.

Ask any actor who has been truly lost in the life of another person if they doubt the mysticism of theatre. Or ask a patron who has walked out of a theater and onto the street barely recognizing the world around them, because they had spent the last two hours in another world. Even the most devout atheist who has seen good theatre must admit that good narrative can transcend the rational and elevate it into the sublime.

What makes "Bully Dance," the second show Argos Productions has produced by Greenwood (they also did "Wandaleria" in 2012), hallowed? What qualifies as holy theatre?

It isn't necessarily religious themes. In "Bully Dance" a young vigilante goes on a killing spree. His victims are men whose names he gathered from a sex offender's list on the Internet. And the partners of the murdered men long for some kind of justice.

Ah-ha, you may say, Why is it that religion always comes with righteous indignation, an elements of the crusades?

The holy theatre has nothing to do with content. The holy theatre is a ritual that consciously evokes something without physical form into a physical space. I'm willing to assert that the holy theatre can be about anything; it can even be a raucous farce. The qualification lies exclusively in the intention of the giver to the beneficiaries. (For example, a s�ance where the medium consciously defrauds her audience is chicanery, but if she believes in the spirits with which she communicates it is holy theatre.)

If you took the story of "Bully Dance" by itself it could be classified in the genre of suspense thriller. It also has elements of the American Western. Told differently it could be "Taxi Driver" or "True Grit." The difference is in the intention.

In the beginning of the play the actors remove their shoes before they enter the stage, setting it apart as sacred space. The action begins at an Easter dinner table, which is in essence an alter with three candles on it. This table it will convert into a witness stand, a line of headstones and the restrictive walls of a bus in which the narrator will never be able to leave.

The bereaved are shrouded in garments of woe that cling to them, pieces of fabric that they are unable to remove. And there are many more Christian symbols that I don't understand the full significance of, but they allude to resurrection and re-birth, things like Easter lilies and red wine.

Also, the structure of the play is less linear and more meditative, being as it is based on a religious ceremony, the choral requiem. (Though it's true the laity has also commandeered this musical style.)

I'm not certain which elements to attribute to the playwright and which to attribute to the director, but director Sarah Gazdowicz has gathered and conducted a perfect ensemble. The actors (Juliet Bowler, Christopher Nourse, Veronica Wiseman, Charlotte Kinder, Lida McGirr and Adam Lauver) are all focused and work together to create the whole. No instrument plays too loudly or off key. And yet, none of them become a scenery, or a cog in a machine. At moments each actor's face disappeared, and in this hallowed space they became people that I know and have known, then faded back into the universal. Even the killer was funny, empathetic and heartbreakingly human.

Elements of this play are "ripped directly from the headlines," and situations in the play directly mirror experience of the playwright. But elements of the play also directly mirror experiences we have all had.

All theatre, be it holy or secular, examines the inexplicable connection between human beings in a way that reason and science cannot.

Running through March 22nd at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston MA. For more information go to www.argosproductions.com.