The Dream Poetics of Theatre Gigante's 'Prison Made of Light'

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Photo courtesy of Theatre Gigante

Thomas Haskell Simpson’s A Prison Made of Light (clockwise): Isabelle Kralj, Mark Anderson, Thomas Haskell Simpson, Ben Yela and John Kishline

Theatre Gigante continued its tradition of presenting challenging dramatic abstractions for performance this week with a debut of Thomas Haskell Simpson’s A Prison Made of Light. The reading of Simpson’s work was presented for a single performance on Zoom on Sep. 16. Performers Mark Anderson, John Kishline, Isabelle Kralj and Ben Yela appeared onscreen in front of identical satellite images of Earth at night. Simpson’s dreamy poetics washed over the evening in a brief and haunting progression of ideas passionately searching for meaning in life, death and everything else.

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Photo courtesy of Theatre Gigante

Playwright Thomas Haskell Simpson

The four performers played prisoners who had migrated from the concrete incarceration of the human body to something else altogether. Maybe it was the afterlife. Maybe it was a brief mingling of consciousnesses on their way from one existential state to another. Whatever it was, it wasn’t grounded in a concrete narrative structure. Bereft of the context of coherent identity, the four characters echoed playfully into infinity as they tried to understand what they were and what they’d lost. Simpson’s work somewhat gracefully ricochets between abstract existential poetics and earthbound biographical narratives. While there is a clear progression from beginning to end, Simpson solidly avoids structure in search of something much more universal than mere form and comprehensibility.

Traditionally Gigante pairs the sort of poetics found in Simpson’s work with simple, striking visuals on an intimate stage. Lacking the intimacy of a stage, the prisoners of light felt substantially more confined than most of the characters in a Gigante show. Though they were free to jump and tumble from realistic narrative fragments to somewhat formless metaphysical linguistic acrobatics, each of the prisoners was clearly confined to a single rectangle of light being projected across the internet via Zoom. A Prison Made of Light is a work in progress. With any luck, Theatre Gigante will be able to present a more expanded realization of Simpson’s work on the live stage at some point in the future.

For more information about upcoming Theatre Gigante projects, visit www.theatregigante.org.

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To read more articles by Russ Bickerstaff, click here.