A terrifying virus is spreading across America in “The Boiling,” a dark phantasmagoria now swamping audiences’ senses in its world premiere production at the Magic Theatre. The play’s title evokes the primary symptom among those infected by the virus; escalating fever, accompanied by an urge toward violence. On stage, though, “The Boiling” also brings to mind a stew pot.
Playwright Sunhui Chang, director Ellen Sebastian Chang, and the show’s formidable creative and technical teams have thrown a such a liberal assortment of ingredients into the mix –a groaning larder of themes, genres, performance styles, and storytelling techniques– that even the most toothsome bits end up bobbing in a rich but muddy gravy.
There are intense David Lynchian film images; historic vignettes played in shadowed silhouette; passages read aloud as third-person narration; live video transmissions of the actors on stage; projected clips of swallow murmurations, staticky newscasts, and a Heckyll and Jeckyll cartoon. There is racial reckoning, serial killing, operatic singing, and pimento cheese.
Ambition run amok
A work of cornucopian imagination, “The Boiling” has two primary storylines.
In one, a pair of federal tracking agents –Vee, a hard-worn middle-aged Black woman, and Brian, a generation younger and Korean American– are on the trail of Carrier X, an infection victim who’s escaped quarantine and is on a demonic, cross-country spree, brutally murdering innocent people while quietly spreading contagion.
Edris Cooper-Anofiwoshe plays Vee with a grizzled world-weary resignation, while John Brougher’s Brian is an earnest, apple-cheeked midwestern type. They’re amiably contrasting buddy cops.
As the agents’ quarry and the show’s only white character, Lawrence Radeker turns in a powerful performance of his own. He’s alone in most of his scenes, performing at a very different valence than the other characters. Contorting his voice and moving with a stylized monster’s gait, he rages, seethes, and at one point snaps a victim’s spine. He’s scary enough to make you uncomfortable in your seat.
The second major narrative is far less dynamic, but often a sweet relief from the harrowing noir of its counterpart. It follows Vee’s semi-estranged son, Cee (Jesse Vaughn), an aspiring neurobiologist in his early twenties who sets out on a mysteriously motivated quest that even he can’t explain.
Starting in Washington state, where he tosses his smartphone into a garbage can, B finds himself inexplicably drawn toward a town called Edgeville, South Carolina.
Though there’s a moment in the play when another character says Edgeville doesn’t exist, B gets himself there and starts to settle in, bonding with an avuncular local birder (Donald E. Lacy), who cracks wise and dispenses nuggets of oblique old-man wisdom. Cee also befriends the gentle town librarian, Miss Lolli (Jeannine Anderson), who starts singing a couple of times, beautifully and befuddlingly.
Guided by Lolli to a cache of old newspapers on microfiche, Cee discovers Edgeville’s dark history of racial violence, episodes of which he rattles off in gruesome detail. He also learns that generations of his mother’s family had lived here, from Antebellum through Jim Crow, then realizes family carries trauma like a pernicious virus.
In the end, Carrier X, the agents, and another character, Cee’s sister, D (Markaila Dyson), whose presence throughout the play feels extraneous, all convene in Edgeville for a last-minute pile-on of hasty revelation and deep meanings.
“The Boiling” means to serve up a feast. It ends up impossible to digest.
‘The Boiling,’ through April 20. $35-$75. Magic Theatre, Landmark Bldg. D, Fort Mason. www.magictheatre.org
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