Attuned to an interior music no one else can hear, the actors jump around in vaguely geometric zigzags on a square of light. Several audience members at the Kitchen never made it past the human pogoing marathon to witness the equally mysterious riffs on biological and societal poisons everything from pesticides and Gulf War fallout to Camay's beauty soap advertising. Presented in a blurry, antinarrative fashion, the production never stoops to didactic assault on our environmental waywardness. It's really more of an exercise in movement, imagery, and pacing with treadmill-like longueurs that occasionally give way to visions of toxic apocalypse. Two moments stand out.
Goat Island imposes a unique physical discipline on their spatial collages.
Their hallucinatory imagination, however, isn't sufficiently distilled. Plot it has aplenty. As news of the South's defeat reaches the mad slaveholder-playwright of the title, he determines to use the staging of his play acted by family and slaves as a means of mass suicide, poisoning them all in the last act. They are not amused, but you will be. Accents range from the Nordic to the hillbilly, the music from Gregorian chant to bluegrass.