Reflections on Fame, Lost and Found: Bughouse and Tru

In two very different rooms, uptown and down, two artists are alone — or, depending on how you look at it, in conversation with the multitude of voices that construct that fragile thing called a self. Superficially, not much seems to connect the men: One is famous (“famous for being famous,” he tells us glibly); the other is an unknown recluse. One feeds off attention and affection; the other burrows out of the sight of his fellow humans. One flirts and drinks and dallies and dances; the other is part child, part monk, his mantel packed with icons and crucifixes, his inner landscape a kind of mental Sagrada Família — a weird and extraordinary edifice constructed around the rigors and promises of Christianity. 

The revival of Tru, Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 play about Truman Capote, and the new work Bughouse — conceived by the director-choreographer Martha Clarke and written for the stage by Beth Henley, drawing from the diaries and fiction of its subject, Henry Darger — make for a fascinating double feature. While Capote was still a child writing his first short stories in Monroeville, Alabama, Darger was a middle-aged hospital janitor in Chicago quietly filling his tiny apartment with hundreds of paintings and drawings and thousands and thousands of pages of writing. This incredible catalogue was discovered only in 1972 when the ailing 80-year-old was moved into a care home, leaving behind, among other things, a 5,000-page autobiography and a 15,145-page novel called In the Realms of the Unreal. The artist told his astonished landlords to “throw it all away.” Instead, they began an in-depth excavation. Less than a year later, Darger died. Meanwhile, he was becoming famous — the patron saint of art brut.

Clarke has certainly gravitated toward an astounding trove of source material. The sheer amount of Darger’s work is dizzying, and its content only adds to the sense of bizarre pathos. A survivor of various sinister institutions — including one then known as the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children — Darger created a vast fictional universe in which armies of child rebels, led by a septet of heroic princesses called the Vivian Girls, wage war against the evil empire of Glandelinia. His prose describes brutal massacres and assassinations, and his paintings — brightly colored battle scenes full of naked children, thunderstorms, and psychedelic nature — feel at once naïve and eerie, fairy-tale worlds touched by Peter Max and Hieronymus Bosch. Clarke made one of her most remarkable theater pieces out of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and it stands to reason that Darger’s cosmos, just as rich and strange with its fixation on the vulnerable body and its weird but crucial foundations in Christian faith, would prove equally attractive.

How sad then that Bughouse, as a piece of theater, is almost entirely inert. Despite Henley’s effort to collage snippets of Darger’s writing into some kind of arc — here delivered by the show’s solo actor, John Kelly, a prolific East Village performance artist in the 1980s — the material continuously pushes back at its shapers. It doesn’t really want to be a play, at least not in the conventional sense. Watching Kelly shuffle from typewriter to windowsill to mantelpiece on Neil Patel’s cluttered tenement diorama of a set, I kept wishing we were anywhere other than a theater. Had I wandered around a corner at MoMA and discovered the Bughouse room — with or without Kelly inside — I would have been thrilled. To move through this space, to experience its density and privacy and breathe its stale air, to see one’s own skin painted with John Narun’s projections, striking images from Darger’s art brought to life by the animator Ruth Lingford — that kind of intimacy, unburdened by narrative, could prove revelatory. Here, it remains a possibility only, suggested by the production’s textural richness but ultimately untapped.

Part of the issue is that it never feels quite right to hear this embodiment of Darger speak aloud. Whether he’s murmuring bits of biography (“I remember the big snowstorm of 1912”) or getting swept up in his imagined universe (“The Vivian Girls fought bravely against the Christian-hating, child-slave-holding Glandelinian demons”), the very fact of recitation chafes. “Throw everything away,” said the dying Darger. This wasn’t a man with any urge to perform. In its current form, Bughouse hasn’t solved its relationship to an audience: Why does Darger, who never needed one in life, need one now? When towering projected flowers twine their way up the walls or a mischievous Vivian Girl peeks in through one of the windows, we get a sense of the production’s real reason for being. But pretty video imagery isn’t enough to necessitate a theatrical event. Right now, Clarke and Henley have taken the most straightforward approach to adapting a life for the stage: Put a character inside a set and have him talk. But the life in question — not to mention the art — is far too unusual for such tactics. As he did while living, Darger strains against his container. He’s too big for the Bughouse.

Truman Capote, meanwhile, never had a problem with performance. “I’m an alcoholic,” he tells us breezily some ways into Allen’s play. “It’s a chemical addiction, not a psychological one.” Whatever the variety of his dependence, he’s equally hooked on us. His audiences give him the oxygen of applause and approval, not to mention access to the glamorous life. When we meet the Capote of Tru, it’s Christmastime, 1975. He breezes around his apartment — in Rob Ashford’s production, we’re in it with him, nestled among the dark wood and old books and fringe-dripping lamps of the historic library at House of the Redeemer — pouring himself glass after glass of bourbon and dishing with friends over the phone. The friends who are still speaking to him, that is.

Allen focuses her portrait of Capote, first staged on Broadway in 1989, on the fallout from the publication of a piece of his work-in-progress novel Answered Prayers in Esquire in 1975. (Thirty-five years after Tru, Ryan Murphy and Jon Robin Baitz homed in on the same scandal for Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.) Answered Prayers drew heavily on the writer’s friendship with a set of wealthy New York socialites including Babe Paley and Nancy “Slim” Keith. They had taken Truman into their circle, gossiped with him, and cried on his shoulder — after which they saw themselves in print, unnamed but unmistakable, the dirt beneath their beautiful lives and high-power marriages exposed for the world’s titillation. They closed ranks and dropped their pet artist. Capote lived for another nine years, making a long descent deeper and deeper into drugs, alcohol, and empty publicity. His glittering social life was shattered; by all accounts, so was his heart.

More than half a century after Capote’s heyday, his particular brand of celebrity eccentricity has turned him into one of those characters (in both senses) that actors love to take a crack at. The style, the mannerisms, the “weird little voice” (Allen’s Truman mocks his mockers) — it all creates a tempting project, awards bait for chameleons like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toby Jones, or Tom Hollander. Now it’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson behind the jauntily tilted hat, the tumbler and cigarette. The question in these cases is always whether the endeavor as a whole will yield something more than the pleasures of a good impression. In this Tru, the answer is: sometimes.

Ferguson keeps his mimicry on the subtler side, if anything about Capote can be called subtle. I sense that for him, Truman is an ancestor — a queer elder who deserves love and respect even in an evocation of his sorry denouement. When Frank Rich reviewed the Broadway premiere of Tru in 1989, he called the play “a creep show: a hybrid of necrophilia and tame fan-magazine journalism” and its star, the once boyish Robert Morse, heavily made up in prosthetics, a “bloated, jowly bubble of flesh,” a “skin-colored tub of Jell-O,” and an “animatronic figure in a macabre theme park.” The memory of the real latter-day Capote surely felt sharper (he died in 1984), the motives of the project more potentially unsettling. With decades of distance added, Ashford’s production is softer around the edges — at times, a little too soft. A second actor, Charlotte d’Amboise, haunts the library before Ferguson enters it. In a slinky black dress and a bejeweled, white-feathered mask, she is all of Truman’s gilded ghosts — mostly Paley but also the beautiful mother who left him with her sisters and a menacing New Orleans medium called Mrs. Ferguson who shamed him when he came to her in desperation as a child. A spectral female presence is intriguing in theory, but Ashford’s choreography for d’Amboise verges on cheesy. For most of the show, her presence doesn’t so much add frisson as push Tru closer to pulp territory.

But Ferguson himself pulls it back from the line. Where he’s concerned, a little softness is a good thing. He gives Truman size and scale without stumbling into burlesque. It’s an affectionate, engaging portrayal, its studied lightness pulled across a tragic core like a lace curtain across a broken window. “I don’t give a shit about any of them,” he sniffs, assuring us of his indifference to the women who’ve cut him. “Except Babe and Slim Keith. Only those two. And I’m confident that in time Slim and Babe will come around. Very confident.” (They didn’t.) 

There’s something of Falstaff in this grandiose, deluded lonelyheart: “I shall be sent for,” the poor old drunkard protests after his dear Prince Hal, now the king, has publicly and savagely disowned him. For those who have allowed themselves to fall in love with royalty — no matter how canny they pretend to be — ignominy and obscurity are mortal wounds. Like the fat knight, Truman is a creature of wit and excess, an addict who will die of heartbreak. He’s a great performer who has reached the edge of his stage. We’re all that’s left for him, out there in the dark. 

Bughouse is at the Vineyard Theater through April 5.
Tru is at House of the Redeemer through May 3.