The press invite to Martha Clarke’s Bughouse at Vineyard caught our attention in a way that publicist emails rarely do. An Off-Broadway show about Henry Darger, the prototypical outsider artist whose extensive 15,000-ish page novel, In The Realms of the Unreal, and hundreds of illustrations were discovered by his landlord after he left for a care facility; the loner who sat in his room in Chicago making fantastical 10-foot paintings of intersex Vivian girls, either cavorting naked with their ding-dongs out or fighting wars when he wasn’t talking to himself in various voices and re-wrapping balls of string; the Catholic-trash-picking hoarder who was so verclempt about losing a photo of a 5-year-old murder victim (not to mention his repeated strangulation imagery in his artwork) that more than fifty years after his death, we still are a tad suspicious of whether HE did it?! Sounds completely insane! To test how buggy Bughouse could get, Emily Colucci and Jessica Almereyda squished themselves into Vineyard’s anti-legroom seats and had a chat about it:

Emily: One of the big draws to Bughouse for me was that Pyramid Club’s own Dagmar Onassis, the Joni Mitchell of Downtown, John Kelly, plays the role of Darger, the only onstage part. Though I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen ANY of these performances (I sadly most recently missed his stint as tattoo artist, pulp fiction writer, and Kinsey collaborator Sam Steward, Underneath The Skin), Kelly has a long history of embodying artists, from Egon Schiele to Caravaggio (the latter of which was partially referenced in his recent PPOW Gallery show). At the same time, Kelly as Darger struck me as odd casting. Kelly is and has always been quite beautiful (I mean, can anyone do Joni Mitchell drag without being gorgeous?), which is not exactly what I picture when I think of Henry Darger, who really just looked kind of bummy. At least that’s what I gather since there are only three known photographs of him, and one is him wolfing down meatloaf or something at a diner. Still, I went into Bughouse with no real expectations, other than hoping it might be nuts.

Now, having seen the show, I think Kelly was both woefully miscast and carried the entire show. Not because his performance wasn’t good, but he’s too naturally charming and good-looking to pull off Darger’s neurodivergent loner eeriness! There should be something not repulsive but at least off-putting about Darger as a person, as well as his cluttered hoarder room, that then collides with the phantasmic, dually whimsical and deranged worlds he created. It almost felt like they WANTED us to like him, which feels uninteresting theatrically. At the same time, Kelly’s performance WAS so compelling that it kept me sucked into the 70-minute performance even though I was still slightly hungover from the Cat Power concert the night before. The show consists of a long solo conversation from Darger in his hoarder apartment, cobbled together from his own writings, like his autobiography, History of My Life, and In the Realms of the Unreal. Through the performance, he recalls his childhood, including his stint at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, and repeated lack of memories of his dead mother and his sister’s adoption; prays to his trash-picked Catholic tchotckes and rails about not being able to adopt children; and obsesses about the weather (which Darger did in his weather journals) and the lost photo of Elsie Paroubek. On the one hand, it would be hard to pull this off without a charismatic actor, but on the other, it didn’t feel right for Darger himself. I also liked that John gave us a little teasing falsetto when he was doing voices at the very start. I wanted a Darger the Musical. How can you cast Kelly and not have him sing at least ONE song?! Come on!

You probably know more about Darger than I do, having worked at Andrew Edlin. What did you think of Kelly’s performance? 

Jess: Kelly is totally endearing and sympathetic, and that’s effective for conveying Darger’s arrested development. I appreciate that the production didn’t try to Ryan Murphy-fy Darger as some crazed, creepy pedo (though I know you’re a Murphy fan), yet overall this is pretty tame stuff. Darger was, by outward appearances, a withdrawn guy, so it’s impressive that Clarke and Kelly deliver a character who is so intelligible.

We’re talking about a reclusive man who, when he wasn’t talking to himself in the voices of different characters, spent his days avoiding people and scrubbing floors as a hospital janitor. You said post-show that there’s nothing at stake in the story, everything has already happened to Darger, he’s just retelling us all the unfortunate things that happened to him, and now it’s all too late for this poor old bugger warped by his experiences.

I won’t pretend to have PhD-level knowledge from those couple of years at Edlin, in lieu of that, I can relay my fellow countryman Robert Hughes’s take, which feels definitive — this from 1997 in Time and worth quoting at length:

Reclusive, poor, and harmlessly mad, Henry Darger (1892-1973) was one of the legion of those who fall through the cracks in American life, never to emerge again… For the last 40 years of his life, he dwelled in a small rented room on Chicago’s North Side, from which he would timorously sally forth to collect street trash. After his pauper’s death, hundreds of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles and nearly a thousand balls of string were found in his room…

It would be easy in these prurient days to think of Darger merely as a compulsive old pervert–a sort of Poussin of pedophilia. (One art-historian-cum-psychiatrist opined in the New York Times that “psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer,” a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about his character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly; much the same–and on the same evidence–could be said about the authors of the Old Testament.)

It makes more sense to relate his work, in all its extreme, inward-directed fantasies of evil and innocence, to Darger’s main lifeline, the Catholic faith. Catholic iconography, as anyone knows who is even briefly exposed to it (and Darger was marinated in its kitsch forms for 70 years), is suffused with Massacres of the Innocents, scenes of the roasting, flaying and disemboweling of idealized martyrs, sinners in hellfire and visions of a countervailing Paradise. Rummaging back through his fantasies for redemption of his own wretchedly maimed childhood, Darger was able to bind up his wounds with his religious fixations. This, in the end, is what gave his art a power that did not exist in his life.

Succinct, eh?

Emily: Well, I’d be all in for a Ryan Murphy-esque trash bastardization, but yes, that would be deeply distasteful, and I’d yet again be the only one defending it amid outrage. Like you, as well as Hughes, said, there’s enough of a history of rumors out there about Darger being an inactive pedo or serial killer that to push that narrative further would be unfortunate. I actually never heard about the serial killer bit until I was reading around about Darger after the show. Like Hughes said, what does it mean to be psychologically a serial killer? (I also like how he mentions the Old Testament, which I’m getting a good refresher on with all of Bibi’s recent genocidal maniac references to the Book of Samuel and the Amalek.)

Maybe the issue is that we don’t really see Darger outside his own little constructed world in his apartment. We aren’t witnessing his reclusive avoidance of others. He yells at his neighbors who are whining about all the noise, but to me, that didn’t scream recluse as much as a typical cranky urban apartment dweller! Inside the hermetically sealed world of the play, we just don’t have context other than what he’s telling us. 

Jess: So the problem then is not with Kelly’s performance but with Beth Henley’s script, which could’ve taken risks other writers have. Darger’s possibly romantic relationship with William “Whillie” Schroeder comes up fleetingly, while it’s the entire thesis of Jim Elledge’s Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy. This from an interview in Chicago Tribune:

There’s a character in Darger’s second novel, “Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House,” a bad little boy named Webber George. And Darger says about Webber George, “One cause mainly of the boy being bad was because he was angry at God for not having created him into a girl, which he wanted to be more than anything else.” After that, Darger adds this little aside, addressing the reader directly in 19th-century fashion: “The reader may think this is strange, but the writer” — he means himself — “knows quite a number of boys who would give anything to have been born a girl.” I think that’s indicative of him being gay… 

I was absolutely sure that Whillie and Darger had a relationship at two points in my research. At one point in Darger’s autobiography, he calls Whillie his “special friend,” which was a phrase that gay men used in the late 1800s and early 1900s to refer to their boyfriends, partners, whatever. It was very common among them. After Whillie died, Darger wrote a letter to Whillie’s sister, in which he says things that only a gay man would have expressed, especially on paper. He wrote: “I feel as if lost in empty space. Now nothing matters to me at all.” Later he says, “I hope you will soon receive consolation, because the loss is hard to take. It sure is to me to lose him, for then too I lost all I had and had a hard time to stand it.” These aren’t the kind of things that straight men write to the sisters of their friends, even their best friends, in 1959, long before gay liberation.

I’m persuaded! It makes you wonder why they didn’t lean into Darger’s queerness more — or at least elaborate on the desire to be female. 

Emily: That quote about the boys wanting to be girls and vice versa is in the play! I was struck by it, but then the production just moved on to more fractured, random bits and pieces of biography and musings. Same with Whillie, who comes up when Darger reminisces about going to amusement parks with him. The script is all so muddled that I didn’t pick up the gay subtext (if there was one) about Whillie. Perhaps the production needed to pick a theme or two and run with that. I’m guessing they didn’t want to Ryan Murphy it and shoehorn Darger into an identity against his posthumous will, but why not? Fuck it! 

Jess: Yes. It was all sort of a tepid autobiographical overview. I found myself glazing over parts of the narration that should jump out. Even if they didn’t want to have emphasis on Whillie, they could have camped it up some. What about cribbing from John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run — a long homage describing the exploits of Darger’s girl army — Ashbery obsessing over Darger’s obsessions — a John Kelly/John Ashbery dyad… 

As far as I’m aware, there’s an ongoing dispute over Darger’s estate between his landlord/estate holder Kiyoko/Nathan Lerner vs. the distant relatives petitioning heirship (if these relatives really cared about his legacy, they’d leave the works already held in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum), which might be one of several reasons why a feature film in the works has been stalled, though they may have also run into the same difficulties faced by this play: how do you dramatize a life of exploitation and abuse and show Darger’s escape into unpalatable fantasy, finding key inspiration in the rape and murder of a young girl? Who really wants to watch that? 

Who would you have cast instead, to manifest a more uncomfortable and eerie Darger? Tom Waits could be a surly grump. Maybe John Malkovich or Elias Koteas, though I consider them too sexy for this role.

Emily: Guy Boyd, who played the Darger-esque janitor in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, was immediately who came to mind for me! Someone who is more like what Hughes says, one of those people who falls through the cracks of American life. Someone you wouldn’t notice sitting at a diner. I’m sure there are enough struggling older actors in New York City who would fit the part! Many of them ALSO live in hoarder homes! 

Jess: Boyd is a good one. There’s such a rich history of compelling artist biopics: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (as you mentioned, John Kelly also played Caravaggio over a decade ago and broke his neck while rehearsing a trapeze performance — a pivotal event in his graphic memoir/latest exhibit last year at PPOW). Then Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch, and Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate and Basquiat…  those were so well cast. I don’t know of any production on William Blake, who is sometimes associated with Darger as they both created self-contained worlds and personal mythologies, and they were both conflicted about religion, only Blake was more literate and lucid. 

I think more than any other artist, John Kelly would be great as Joseph Cornell, another brilliant eccentric who had compulsions in common with Darger. Only Darger lost his mother very young — Cornell lived with his mother most of his life… somebody needs to pursue this!

Emily: Ohhhh…Kelly as Cornell would be fantastic. Another issue was the production’s elaborate projection and sound design, which overshadowed Kelly’s performance. Though Darger is alone for the entire performance, except when interrupted by annoyed neighbors, he’s continually surrounded by projections on the windows, the mirrors, and occasionally filling the whole room with giggling Vivian girls imagery from his artwork. Sometimes these projections talk back like central In the Realm character Annie Aronburg with her Shirley Temple curls. At times, I liked the projections. I was quite taken by the scene in which Darger’s vibrant flowers grow into the entire Vivian girls’ world, projected over him, hunched at his typewriter. Afterward, you compared this moment to immersive Van Gogh Experiences, which is quite accurate, so maybe I’m just a cheese-loving sucker. But it worked to portray this solitary man with a wild imagination that bloomed in his humble room. Other times, though, not so much. I didn’t need old footage of Chicago streets when he was discussing his childhood, which made me distracted, wondering if that footage is probably in the public domain! Or the worshipful churchy stained glass windows during prayer. I don’t WANT to be transported when he’s praying. Let me drift off, considering how he dumpster dived for all that Catholic tat (And also how I should start collecting Catholic gewgaws). And what was with that little cartoon bird! Are we in Snow White?!

Even though the projections worked sometimes, there were undeniably way too many of them, an overreliance that belies some kind of insecurity in the production, as if they didn’t trust the audience enough to pay attention without screens blaring at us. Being in a theater watching a live performance is actually the perfect time NOT to be forced to stare at a screen! 

Jess: Emphasis on your last point: we don’t need screen projections in a theater. And if you do use them, then go aaallll the way with depicting those Donald Duck-faced clouds and savage cyclones. And show us the carnage of disemboweled girls while you’re at it. Give the audience a well-rounded education! The main issue with animation is how it loses the tactile textures of Darger’s collages, and bumps up watery colors that look more muted in the flesh. It annoys me when plays get elaborate with projections (or “media moments”) in this way because it’s a distraction from the performer in front of us, especially when the set itself is already elaborate enough with the artist’s clutter. I wonder if they ever considered a version where it’s just Darger in a white room with a mop and bucket. 

Emily: It should have been 70 minutes of him mopping the floor in silence! 

Jess: LOL. 70 minutes is an absolute sweet spot for any play in my book. Never overstay your welcome. You remember that Morgan Bassichis one-person show, Can I Be Frank, at SoHo Playhouse we saw last year? It was so simple in its staging. Maybe this is an unfair comparison, Bassichis was resurrecting the spirit of artist Frank Maya, who was also a performer, which is easier than dealing with a visual artist…

Emily: I agree, it is harder to deal with a visual artist than a performer like Maya, but I think dialing back the projections would have at least given Faye Armon-Troncoso’s set some attention, which was one of the parts I did quite enjoy. Darger’s room was delightfully accurate, from his grumpy homemade no-smoking sign to his Catholic corner to all of his comic source material he used to create his artwork. I was particularly taken by the details, especially the stacks upon stacks of National Geographic magazines sitting next to his table. What’s with hoarders and National Geographic?! Like moths to a flame. I’ve always been fascinated by Darger’s hoarder room, mostly because I love hoarders in general and ecstatically creative hoarders even more! 

Jess: The set, screens aside, was appropriately claustrophobic. I would’ve added a smattering of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles, along with the balls of string he kept winding-unwinding…

Emily: I’m sure Pepto, like everything else nowadays, is too expensive at CVS to empty out and throw around a stage! In the days after we saw Bughouse, I keep wondering about what audience members would have gathered if they went into the theater knowing absolutely nothing about Darger. Would it have made sense at all?! After the performance, you mentioned Jessica Yu’s 2004 Darger doc In the Realms of the Unreal, which I revisited the next day. On rewatch, the similarities with the performance were stunning, including many of the same autobiographical quotes from his writings. According to the playbill, Clarke seems to have been working on this for several years, yet when rewatching the doc, it’s as if Clarke and Henley simply adapted a theatrical version of Yu’s documentary! Maybe it’s only that what we know about Darger is so limited that’s inevitable, but theatrical imagination can be used too!! 

The wildest part is that the flaws in the film are exactly the same as the performance: First, the overreliance on animated versions of his artwork and gratingly long sequences using old footage of Chicago. But secondly, the way the documentary and the play weave Darger’s biography and his artwork together act as explainers to his batshit writings and paintings. We’re supposed to understand his fixation with children and their goodness as a part of his own trauma. But, to me, that’s not only woefully reductive, it’s also uninteresting. Darger had an imagination, too! 

I understand why both did it, though; it’s a way to comfortably explain the mystery of both Darger as this schizo-adjacent loner figure and his more uncomfortable artistic choices. He’s not just obsessively painting nude girls with pee-pees—it’s TRAUMA! The content advisory also exposes the production’s discomfort with Darger’s own imagery, even though the play (and the doc) tiptoes around the more distressing imagery in Darger’s paintings. Just flashes of bloodied, disemboweled children and children being strangled with their tongues bulging from their reddened faces. I think if you’re going to do work on Darger, you have to tolerate SOME audience level discomfort, no?

Jess: Well, WE could’ve tolerated it — though who knows what the Reddit reaction would’ve been. One seasoned theatergoer insisted it was the most milquetoast play they’d ever seen. Mean!

Clarke could’ve taken a more imaginative and expressionistic approach than expository-biography. She could have made more daring leaps beyond Yu’s relatively cute documentary narrated by baby-voiced Dakota Fanning, though of course that doc has dynamic elements and testimonies from people who knew and interacted with Darger — the most moving of which from an altar boy who frequently encountered Darger receiving communion and gazed into his mercy-seeking eyes. 

Neither of us have any patience for trauma discourse and the way it flattens experience. That said, Darger was deeply troubled, and his work reflects real anguish. He was empathizing with his girls, and heroicizing them, and he was also their torturer and extreme weather reaper. He was also understandably full of rage, which manifested in sacrilegious acts of burning Christ’s image and cussing at God — all of that was pretty understated in the performance.

Any portrayal of Darger is going to be fraught. How to handle all those demons and inconclusive threads? How to handle stories of maimed children? And who needs a fantasy saga anyway when we have a battle playing out in real-time with the horrific bombing of a girls school and black acid rain falling on Iran.