Just days from opening, composer Charles Kim provides another taste of the music that is integral to Boneyard Prayer.
“Alice”
“Haunting String Quartet, No Bear”
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I just saw the preview performance of Boneyard Prayer. If you are planning on going to see it, read no further because I reveal quite a bit. In my simple-minded opinion, the things that worked well:
1. The downstage set. An eerie combination of railroad, graveyard, and coal mine. The back and forth movement complemented the transient lives of the characters
2. The music. Simple, sweet, and melancholy. The upstage upright piano was an especially nice touch.
3. The Martin and Alice puppets. Having the youthful actors animate the more mature puppets made for some tender and very emotional moments.
The things that didn’t work well:
1. Story development. The central tragedy was revealed way too early so that we spent the rest of the play reliving it, overhead onscreen, with the infant puppet rising from the dead, and (implicitly) in song. The play needed more story. If other aspects of Alice’s and Martin’s lives were explored more in depth, it may have worked, but we only got a glimpse of Alice’s childhood then it was back to baby-mourning.
2. The upstage set, by which I mean the screen. Technically, it worked very well and the simple, line drawings with hinged movements complemented the depression-era timeline. However, I felt that I didn’t need to see Martin and Alice’s memories so graphically revealed. It felt trite. Not enough was left to the imagination.
3. The dead baby puppet. There was no appropriate surrogate puppeteer for him and watching Alice holding him high by his neck then dropping him. Yikes.
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