Wistaria

Walking into Hillyer Art Space’s main room, its walls lined with white folding chairs with a rustically set table at the head, you might get the feeling that you’re walking into a town hall meeting instead of a Fringe Festival performance. The cast members circulate, in crisp suits and dresses, handing out homemade song books bound with rough twine. And when Jeremy Goren takes the floor to speak, he does so with charisma, each syllable of the read-out speech deliberate and clear.

Wistaria is, as their website claims, “an intimate meeting of people that questions and may threaten — through text, action, and song — the stories we use to placate our minds.” It is as much a political discussion as it is a strange rhythmic cacophony of quotes from The Crucible and the Bible blended with old American folk songs (and even a hilarious few verses of Bush’s Glycerine), all accompanied by the almost ritualistically precise and sometimes erratic movement of its actors.

Wistaria, in this way, finds a ready home in Hillyer Art Space, as it is as much a slideshow of abstract and expressionist art as the paintings that hang on the museum’s walls.

In short, Wistaria is a thinly connected assembly of vague scenes, whose metaphors and symbolism can fly over the heads of unprepared audience members. This is not the case with all — one particularly memorable sequence juxtaposes Richard Sheimmel discussing how crazy in love he is with his wife even after six months of marriage with a corny joke told by Goren; this preparation, by contrast, implies that marriage is as much a joke as a duck walking into a bar and asking for grapes.

Overall, Wistaria is experimental, but the cast is charming and talented, polite enough that with a little encouragement they had the whole audience singing “glory, glory, hallelujah” along with them.

If that kind of production isn’t your cup of tea, this isn’t one for beginners — it can be confusing, even uncomfortable, but rewarding, in that it encourages reflection and critical thought about how we each experience our political and cultural identities, whatever they may be.

Take me to the DCTS 2014 Capital Fringe Guide