Heather Christian’s Animal Wisdom Returns, Its Magnetism Intact

“Praise be the wrecking ball,” sings Kenita Miller at the start of Animal Wisdom, a spiritual autobiography tucked inside a requiem mass mixed with a folk-blues concert, all steeped in the haunted brackish waters of the Mississippi delta. A few minutes later, she explains: “When I say ‘praise be the wrecking ball’ I mean my brain. That one’s a metaphor.” It’s also an act of channeling — because the brain in question really belongs to Animal Wisdom’s creator and original performer, the truly alone-in-her-class composer Heather Christian. “It’s my life story,” Christian writes in a program note, “as clearly as I can tell it (which is not very clearly at all).” She’s underselling herself: Clarity isn’t paramount here, at least not in the contemporary sense. But that word, clear, comes from the Latin for brightness or splendor, and that bursts from Christian’s work with supernova force. At heart, she is a mystic poet. Ecstatic catharsis is her métier, and Animal Wisdom is luminous with it.

Christian has been working on the show for more than a decade, and though she originally conceived it with herself at the center — belting its clarion refrains and whaling on the piano with a virtuosity somewhere between Rachmaninov and Memphis Slim — she has, in recent days, reimagined it with another actor embodying the figure of “H.” (Miller, with a bittersweet gaze and a voice that can be both divine hammer and embroidery needle, takes on most of the performances in this revival, with Emma Duncan stepping in for several matinees.) It’s a shift that may simply reflect aging and changing — these days, Christian told me last fall, “the holding of the pen is the holy thing” for her, and “the peacock in me can sort of chill.” But it also offers a glimpse of insight into that startling image of the wrecking ball. Why would one of the American theater’s most brilliant and heart-forward makers see her own mind as a tool of destruction?

Perhaps because it’s one thing to be called brilliant and another to attempt daily life from inside a psyche as evidently sensitive and expansive as Christian’s. She also told me, “I started having panic attacks. And I wrote Animal Wisdom to exorcise whatever that was … which kind of worked but didn’t totally.” In the play — framed as a seance that, like much of Christian’s writing, borrows its structure from Catholic liturgy — H speaks to and through her ancestors, calling on the ghosts of the people who shaped her in a ritual that’s equal parts ardent and anguished, Christian and pagan, celebratory and purgative. H is “a migraine suffering musician who talks to dead people,” and she doesn’t mean that in a cute, tea-lights-and-sage sort of way. Her earnestness is so intense that it burrows all the way through sentiment into something else, something darker and thicker. It both arms and disarms, fueling a performance that explodes more violently the deeper it travels inward. “I’ve come here to let something go,” H tells us, “and I invite you to do the same.” It’s a reminder that profound encounters of the intellect and the spirit cost something. Entropy is the law of the universe, but oh, the surges of heat and light along the way.

The director Keenan Tyler Oliphant and the lighting designer Masha Tsimring have worked with Christian before, and both are ideal shapers-in-space for her intricately wrought emotional maximalism. Here, Oliphant puts audience on both sides of the performance (the mirror effect of traverse staging always induces self-reflection), and, along with scenic designer Emmie Finckel, absolutely soaks the room in atmosphere. A collection of carpets and mossy greenery covers the floor, sprouting beds of paper flowers with sparkling gem centers; teetering wooden shelves are stacked with knickknacks — candles and reliquaries, an old plastic light-up nativity, tea cups delicately suspended from fishing line, a canvas sail tied up with rope to a wooden yardarm. Lengths of green chain drip over the balconies like hungry vines, evoking the kudzu that’s swallowing H’s hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where the bluffs have been slowly but surely eroding for hundreds of years and where “houses just straight up fall into the river.”

The sensation is of walking into a bayou junk shop that’s been abandoned and left to flower, and within and around these verdant crannies, Tsimring conjures a literal electric storm. “The light and the dark, ok?” H says, putting into the simplest possible terms the forces that are at war within her and will soon be spilling across the stage. Tsimring, one of the best we have, grabs hold of the prompt and flies with it like a singer with a dizzying coloratura aria. If H tells us that the theater space is haunted, it’s Tsimring who really makes us feel it. Marveling at her work, it struck me that, while you could shut your eyes at any Heather Christian show and be transported, you could, at this one, give up your hearing and still experience something revelatory. 

To see it and to hear it, though — that’s the full wallop to the sternum, the battering ram that doesn’t simply destroy but cracks through, making way for a torrent of light and producing a thousand shimmering fragments. In her ongoing grapple with the southern Catholicism of her upbringing, Christian does often feel like she’s shattering a great stained-glass window and rearranging the pieces. In Animal Wisdom, with Miller as her conduit, she uses the shards to reveal reflections of the people she calls “my dead,” from her great-grandmother Ella and her grandmothers Heloise and Geraldine to her erudite godfather Miles and her institutionalized great-uncle R.L. There’s also a gleeful sequence where the six members of the virtuosic onstage band swan around in polyester housecoats and peroxide wigs, all representing H’s childhood piano teacher Doris, a woman who toured with Horowitz and sounds like Foghorn Leghorn with a pack-a-day Virginia Slims habit. “Lizst. Beethoven. Debussy…” growls Doris, “These men will be your greatest lovers and they will never leave you.” This just after she has ordered 11-year-old H to go after the sustain pedal like she’s squeezing Debussy’s nuts.

Doris’s animal wisdom is of a specific kind, but Christian’s title takes many shapes throughout the show. “Grandmother is a red bird,” H sings, and she tells us soon afterward that this is no metaphor: “When my grandmother Geraldine died, she threw her ghost into a cardinal.” For H, her ancestors persist in the living world — inside ferns and cicadas and even skunks — or they slouch through her dreams as beasts. “These days I go to sleep and I have the same nightmare,” she says, and Miller’s body tenses as if she’s preparing for battle. “A lion sneaks up behind me, steps into my body and roars. I don’t recognize my voice. A quaking soprano, a real diva, man, a fucking legend of a diva. And then I die.” Like the enormous, ancient catfish that burrow into the riverbanks deep below Natchez, spurring on bluff erosion by making “voids the size of school buses,” H’s ghosts can be destructive but they aren’t intrinsically malign. They’re just dug in deep, looking for a place to lay their heads, reminding H, however tender or frightening their language, not to fear the dark.

I first saw Animal Wisdom in 2017 at the Bushwick Starr, back when the theater was essentially housed in a garret. I was early in my career as a critic — I walked in with no idea of what I was about to see, and stumbled down the skinny staircase two hours later dazzled and decimated. If I’m being honest, I couldn’t gather myself enough to write about it at the time. When our “Best Theater of the Year” listings were due, I finally mustered a paragraph of praise from the churn of my own response. I’m a little older now, and so is Christian, and I might not go to pieces quite as readily as I used to, but the breaking, bracing impact of Animal Wisdom is as potent as ever. At the same time, its “lecture demonstration of channeling through music” (Christian’s words in her composer’s note) is gaining new dimension, new depth of personal analogy, through the presence of another body and soul speaking with its author’s voice. And what a voice — what an instrument of razing and of raising. Praise be the wrecking ball.

Animal Wisdom is at Signature Theatre through June 14.