Chicago painter's work inspired translation to stage

May 9, 2008

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
It was while working at the Chicago Cultural Center several years ago that writer-director Devon de Mayo first encountered the work of the fabled Chicago “outsider” artist, Henry Darger.
“They had an exhibit of art brut that included one of his paintings,” recalled de Mayo. “It was my first experience of Darger, and I was completely mesmerized. In fact, during the three months the show was on display I went back as often as I could to study his two-sided painting which had a tornado approaching a large group of girls on-the-run on one side, and then showed them in a happier state on the other.”
Now, after years of researching Darger’s work, and thinking about how to give it a theatrical form, de Mayo is about to debut her original promenade production, “As Told by the Vivian Girls.” This evocation of Darger’s work, featuring a cast of 15, opens Saturday at Theater on the Lake, and will take audiences on a journey through many of the building’s ordinarily unseen, eerily beautiful rooms.
Darger (1892-1973), was the reclusive, mentally unstable bachelor who earned a meager living for most of his life by working as a janitor in a Catholic hospital. All the while, in the confines of his cramped studio at 851 Webster in Lincoln Park, he created a massive, elaborately illustrated manuscript titled “The Story of the Vivian Girls.” Darger’s fantastic saga, numbering about 15,000 pages, chronicled events in the “Realms of the Unreal.” It was there that he imagined a Christian army of pre-pubescent girls from the nation of Anniennia who battled against child slavery and the sadistic outrages of the godless Glandelinians. The large, richly hued watercolors for that manuscript — visionary and often violent panoramic tableaux filled with figures he traced from comic books, magazine clippings and children’s books — are now among the most coveted works in the whole field of “outsider” art.
“Early on I watched a documentary about Darger and did extensive research, but I realized I didn’t want to write a traditional play about him,” said de Mayo. “I wanted the audience to experience multiple points of view, with no real sense of completion, because this was an artist whose life and work were such mysteries. So I began by devising a flow chart that took different paths into five major paintings. Theatergoers will have to make choices about which path to follow, and they will always be missing some things.”
“The paintings I chose have very different moods: One with a girl in wartime, one in a sea of flowers, one with the girls in church, another very brutal picture littered with bodies that have been strangled or sliced open. The key for me was to stay in the world of Darger’s imagination, not his personal life, and to find a way to make his two-dimensional figures more three dimensional. There will be a Darger figure, as well as a nun who delivers the prologue and explains the rules of engagement to the audience. The overall scenario is about heading into war and then the end of war.”
De Mayo, 28, who currently serves as director of the Northlight Theatre Academy, grew up in Southern California, moved to Chicago after college, and worked in Steppenwolf Theatre’s intern program. She went on to earn her MFA in directing at London’s Middlesex University, spending extensive periods of study in Moscow and Bali as part of that program.
It was while living in London that she saw an acclaimed promenade production of “Faust,” presented by Punchdrunk Theatre and staged in a five-floor dockside warehouse.
“The whole audience wore masks which made it more difficult to cling to your friends as you moved around, and forced you to take your own journey,” de Mayo recalled. “I’ve picked up on that mask idea in ‘Vivian Girls,’ with the audience asked to wear masks that make them appear to be part of the vast sea of girls in Darger’s pictures.”
NOTE: Henry Darger’s studio has been recreated as an elaborate installation at the Intuit gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee, where it will be on view through June 28. And at 8 p.m. on June 5, Leonard Slatkin will lead the the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the Chicago premiere of composer Jefferson Friedman’s “Sacred Heart: Explosion,” an orchestral piece inspired by a Darger painting.