Burning Bluebeard (review)

On 30 December 1903, during an afternoon matinee of a pantomime, Mr. Bluebeard, Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre went up in flames. The fire killed over 600 audience members, mostly women and children, and one performer. In an ensemble piece written by Jay Torrence and presented by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists, Burning Bluebeard followed a group of six lightly singed and smoking clowns as they tried to reconstruct this doomed final performance of the pantomime, this time hoping to avoid the fire. Iroquois stage manager Robert Murray (Torrence) described the cast’s primary objective thus: to “create a fairy tale for you . . . [and] put a happy ending in a room.” In the intimate performance space of the Neo-Futurarium, the company deployed ludic moments of clown work, pop-inflected dance drama, and fragmented narrative strategies in order to seduce the audience into their recreation of the matinee. But as the production built in momentum toward the fated first scene of the second act, against the best intentions of the company, the show veered once more off the rails and into the fire pit. With the same commitment that it gave to the onstage creation of a fairytale world, the Neo-Futurists revived the most disastrous theatre fire of modern history in all its visceral horror, casting us in the role of that ill-fated audience.

Burning Bluebeard was as much about the imaginative capacity of the theatre to forge worlds on-stage as it was a study of the dark underside of a theatrical relationship that ultimately disciplines the audience into a dangerously docile form of spectatorial subjectivity. One of the dominant trends in politically oriented modern theatre is the deployment of fragmentation and self-conscious theatricality to produce a reflexive and critically engaged audience. Burning Bluebeard calls this strategy into question with a tacit admission that even these strategies often result in an audience that is so seduced by the magic of a performance that it becomes submissive and inactive, even against its own impulse for self-preservation. In many ways, this relationship between performer and audience is resonant with Thomas Hobbes’s description of the tie that binds a sovereign to its subject: obedience for protection. All too often, Western audiences submit to the performers, obediently seated, facing forward, and silent; they do so knowing that whatever ills befall the characters are reserved for the stage only. But in the case of Burning Bluebeard, it was precisely by giving in to the spectacle onstage that the audience was lulled into a horrifying death.

The ensemble in Burning Bluebeard. (Photo: Evan Hanover.)

The nearly ninety minutes of the performance flew by at a frenzied pace as the clowns shifted between earnest enthusiasm and abject terror, piecing together and restaging the pantomime from traumatically fragmented memories. Four of the six clowns were based on members of the original Mr. Bluebeard company, including Murray; others were fictional creations, manifestations of the company’s wish to produce a spectacular dramatic event. This was the case with Molly Plunk’s pixieish Faerie Queen, who silently pranced around the stage while overseeing moments of stage magic that included the transformation of a ladder into aerialist Nellie Reed’s (Leah Urzendowski) high-wire act, or the raising of a full moon with the help of shimmering lights and a painted, wooden moon mask. The company repeatedly assured us that they only wanted to provide us with a “safe, happy ending.” Dazzled by the earnest insistence of the actors, playful dramaturgy, and moments of imaginative illusion (such as the aerialist act), many of us in the audience were charmed into giving them the chance to achieve this goal, in spite of the fact that they all but assured us of our pending incineration.

Everything drove toward act 2, scene 1, the moment when Mr. Bluebeard ended and the fire began. The fire sequence was paradigmatic of the Neo-Futurists’ virtuosic ability to use the stage to realize a captivating, sensory-rich experience. Smoke...