Anne Washburn is one of our most gifted young playwrights, often interested in the nature of storytelling and the sense of community that can be built from shared public narratives. The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, set in a West Coast commune whose fragility is shattered by the suicide death of one of its members, is a fascinating exploration of individuals drawn to a certain kind of crunchy-granola ethos and to the idea of building a sustainable corner of the world for themselves.
While Washburn does a wonderful job of sketching a sense of this fledgling collective, and the ethical dilemmas that arise when they decide to self-cremate the body of their colleague Peter (Tom Pecinka) rather than alert the authorities to his passing, too much of the play feels like a rough draft in search of a coherent point of view or narrative throughline. The cast of eight plays not only adult members of the community but also its children, who in one scene single out one of the barn’s newborn piglets convinced that is the reincarnated form of Peter and should be spared from the usual course of food production. (How the creature is meant to survive without its mother’s teats is never clear.)
There are passes at dramatic tension throughout. A phone call from Peter’s mom sets everybody on edge, but leader Thomas (Bruce McKenzie, prickly and officious) spins a smooth lie and then persuades the group to unplug the landline for good. Then there’s the arrival of Peter’s brother, Will (Pecinka again), who seems oddly oblivious to the children’s not-so-veiled disclosures about Peter’s whereabouts. The official line is that Peter packed up a duffel bag and left the group in the middle of the night, apparently after a fight with his single mom lover, Mari (Marianne Rendón), whose brattish young son Milo (Bobby Moreno) serves as a quasi-narrator of the play.
The second act is mostly devoted to an elaborate pageant, supposedly a pet project of Peter’s completed in his absence, that spins out a fairy tale about a cookie-baking princess (Cricket Brown), her selfish father king (Donnetta Lavinia Grays), and a princely suitor (Bartley Booz) who endures all manner of hardships, including repeated deaths and the attack of a giant puppet dragon (designed by Monkey Boys Productions), to demonstrate the worthiness of his love. But as diverting as this panto-style production is, it doesn’t deepen our understanding of this community or what exactly drove Peter to end his life.
There’s a woodsy polish to director Steve Cosson’s production, with first-rate performances, a rustic but detailed set by Andrew Boyce, hippieish costumes by Emily Rebholz, outdoors-suggesting lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, and sound design by Ryan Gamblin that captures every crackle of a bonfire and din of crickets. But far too much of The Burning Cauldron feels like an inchoate project that hasn’t had enough time to settle in and take shape. Washburn raises a lot of interesting and even disturbing issues over the course of the play, but they remain not only unresolved but often shockingly unexplored. (At one point, Milo confesses that he was sexually assaulted at age 8 by one of the older men in the group — a revelation that he brushes aside even from his adult perspective: “even years and years of therapy will not convince me that rape is the exact word for it.” The subject is never raised again.)
This is one weird commune — but it’s unclear whether we are meant to view the group as heroic, tragically flawed, or somewhere in between. There’s a loose, apparently nondenominational religiosity to the group, with grace said at every meal, a vague commitment to self-sustaining agricultural living, and hints that Thomas might be a bit domineering. But aside from Milo’s off-handed confession there are no other hints that this is in any way a sex cult, and Thomas is easily shut down by others when he veers off into lecture mode. Mostly, this seems to be a group of well-meaning hippies muddling through life together. But muddling is not the stuff of most dramas — nor a sufficient reason to spend so much time with these well-intentioned strangers, especially after the play establishes some lofty stakes that wind up being squandered rather than fully developed. ★★☆☆☆
THE BURNING CAULDRON OF FIERY FIRE
Vineyard Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 30 for $38 to $114
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