Dispatches From the Edge

Photo By Bret Brookshire

JUDGES 19 (Black Lung Exhaling)

Running time: 40 min

Ruth Margraff's album-length play, or proletariat operetta, uses song to convey practically all of her highly poetic and lyricized language, offering a vague tale of the rough, difficult life among West Virginia coal miners -- Margraff's family. Starting with the story of the Levite and the Concubine from a chapter of the Old Testament, Judges 19, Margraff weaves a sometimes hypnotic, sometimes brutal vision with song-text that sounds either biblical or Virginian, or both. Set to a variety of rhythmic guitar pieces by composer Nick Brisco, the operetta is perhaps more performance than play, its story submerged under snarling chords, darkly sung monologues, and little dramatic interaction among the two characters. It's all in the songs.

Brisco plays the Levite, and Margraff the Concubine in what is for her a rather brave performance: The UT playwriting professor is searching for a way to better interact with future actors of her plays, and this onstage effort demands a no-holds-barred approach to her own acting. It's a baptism of fire, as the red-dressed, red-trussed Margraff often sings into a microphone set so low she has to sprawl across the floor. Brisco accompanies her songs, and his own, with live guitar (some music is recorded), standing in dark cowboy hat and dark clothes, mostly brooding: They seem to have been pulled out of an old photograph.

Director Katherine Owens of Dallas' Undermain Theatre, which produced this play, allows the actors an easy, even languid time of it: Brisco and Margraff rearrange themselves for each "number" in unhurried fashion. There are few props, and those that exist can't really keep up with Margraff's intense poetry, so the pair of life-size skeleton drawings on the floor don't really have the same imagistic impact as Margraff lying beside them singing her red vocal turmoil. It would help, too, if the sound system were just a little clearer, to be able to distinguish the details of Margraff's rich, layered poetry, so that when the performance comes to its rather abrupt conclusion, her words don't drift back into the deep history from whence they've been drawn. (Friday, Feb. 2, 10:45pm)