“Mud” and “Drowning,” two plays at Mabou Mines, are about the strange wilderness that grows when the garden of our potential goes untended.
The source of the palpable, growing tension between the couple seems to be their unequally yoked aspirations. Mae wants to learn, and, by way of learning, to rise from her tough circumstances—they live in obvious poverty, in a “wooden room which sits on an earth promontory”—but Lloyd can’t, or won’t, try to meet her on higher ground. Knowledge, in this play, is an ever-churning system of unveiling and subsequent disillusion.
“We are related but I don’t know what to call it. We are not brother and sister. We are like animals who grow up together and mate. We were mates till you came here, but not since then, I could not be his mate again, not while you are here, I am not an animal. I care about things, Henry, I do. I know some things that I never learned. It’s just that I don’t know what they are. I cannot grasp them.”
The mythic cast of the characters’ speech put me in mind of the Eden story—the tantalizing, elusive idea of escape by way of education makes Henry a kind of serpent, dangling his relative worldliness as fruit from a forbidden tree. Akalaitis’s production, modern and elegant, helps that feeling along. The lighting scheme, eerie with ambient neons, by Thomas Dunn, is simple and hip and emotionally astute.
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