Bleeding Clear
If experience is the best teacher, Shea Nangle and Johnnie Morello have earned their doctorates. Judging from their new one-man shows at Cafe Voltaire, both have taken big, juicy bites out of life–though in Nangle’s case it seems he’s tasted little but gall–and both have learned to distill their personal stories to the engrossing essentials. In a city full of freshly graduated twenty-something actors seemingly un-marked by their existence, these well-worn veterans bring a weighty presence to the stage that no amount of collegiate theatrical training can duplicate.
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To call Nangle one of life’s veterans at the age of 22 may seem odd. But in his hour-long Bleeding Clear, he recites a litany of harrowing personal experiences, beginning in early childhood and running smack up to the present, that would have landed most of us in a psychiatric institution or an early grave. Nangle, however, has somehow remained on his feet and chronicled it all in excruciating detail. A neighborhood boy rapes him when he’s only six, an experience he heartbreakingly enjoys because he imagines it makes him a big boy (he even goes running off to tell his mother about the “fun game” until the perpetrator violently stops him). By the time Nangle’s a teenager he’s dating Meredith, a sadistic 16-year-old who routinely ties him up and whips him with a riding crop. Nangle admits that he plays along, despite his revulsion and fear, because the alternative is to be alone. He rips through college on a drug- and alcohol-induced tear, at one point dousing his hand in grain alcohol and setting it on fire. By the end of the piece he’s been brutally raped by another man who repeatedly calls him “bitch.” He wakes the next morning to find his genitalia slashed and bleeding.
Nangle’s only self-consciously theatrical choice is to place himself as far from his audience as possible in Voltaire’s tiny underground performance space; there he’s pinned under three harsh white lights like the victim of his own interrogation. The great gulf of darkness that separates Nangle from his audience gives the piece a necessary sense of scale. Removed from us, chiseled against the dark, Bleeding Clear is revealed in all its horrifying clarity.
Morello’s delicately shaded, effortlessly embodied creations seem more like parts of himself than separate characters, giving SOME no-BODIES a warm and personal feel. While Stevens’s accompaniment is a bit too workmanlike to follow all of the intricate contours of the stories, live jazz accompaniment nicely underscores the musicality of Morello’s voice. A smoky uptown nightclub and a glass of bourbon are all he needs to be where he truly belongs.
