Jennie Richee (Or Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe) (review)

Grainy film footage of a hurricane rising, precisely-traced drawings of colored botanica, sausage-like puppets that pass for internal organs strewn across a war zone—so imagined is the iconography of self-taught Chicago-based artist Henry Darger in Ridge Theater's production of Jennie Richee (or Eating Jalooka Fruit Before It's Ripe). From Bill Morrison's filmwork, documenting weather conditions (the atmospheric mundane) in their extreme, to Laurie Olinder's stunning projections on scrims that shift from opaque to transparent, and finally, to Pilar Limosner's faithfully rendered costumes, the lush visual life of Jennie Richee delivers wallop. The sheer sensory thrill of the display, deepened by Bob McGrath's multi- leveled, platform staging, is immediate and oddly invigorating, given the grim vision embedded in Darger's work.

Part dream ballet, part postmodern head trip, Jennie Richee conjures one of the twentieth century's more intriguing artists, Henry Darger, whose beautifully sinister imagery, prescience of technique in collage and appropriation, and status as a marginal figure compel us today. Working from his one-room apartment in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, Darger (1892-1973) was at once acutely engaged by the processes of artmaking and storytelling, and profoundly traumatized by a childhood marred by loss and abuse.

Jennie Richee summons the disturbing psychic landscape through which Darger wandered, overlaying in palimpsest manner selections from his biographical writings and excerpts from his 15,000 page narrative, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, on which he worked for over twenty years. Written by hand, then carefully re-typed, The Realms follows the alternately fantastic and elating, violent and tragic adventures of the Vivian Girls, seven warrior children—their images literally cribbed from department store catalogues—who rise up to defend a world of enslaved children against an evil race of adults, the Glandelinians.

If the narrative of The Realms marks the extremes of good and evil as understood by an arrested mind, its accompanying illustrations suggest a more complex universe charged by beauty and terror. Using techniques and images borrowed from popular culture and advertising, Darger renders the girls and, indeed, all the ambiguously sexed children who populate the story, in various states of dress and nakedness. Whether dressed as boys or girls, the children come equipped with penises; yet confused in gender, they arguably remain untouched by sexuality. Equally provocative is the graphic violence they encounter at the hands of the Glandelinians—gore imagined primarily through spilled blood and splayed body parts. Darger's Realms utters an urgent message of alienation and conflicted ideals, drawn in dense imagery and the power of the visual.

The Ridge Theater first presented a workshop of Jenni Richee at St. Ann's in 1999; it subsequently produced the show at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and New York's The Kitchen in 2001. This third incarnation unravels as theatre. As its extraordinary design assumes increasing power and precedence on the stage, the production retreats from dynamic, performed engagement with Darger's work and character, and becomes instead an increasingly literal illustration of The Realms.

The handling of Darger's madness presents numerous challenges—how to balance representations that neither valorize nor titillate his thoughts, or how to conjure the depths of trauma. The audience encounters Darger—smartly underplayed by Daniel Zippi—in the opening scene, on a hospital gurney, confused at where he finds himself, asking: "What am I doing in this picture?" The surprise conveyed is evocative of the gap between secret thoughts and best intentions, between private dreams and daily circumstance. Darger's existential question underscores Ridge Theater's take on his work. Scenes shift between true-life moments from Darger's life, including his search for a lost...