Coldblooded look at gun violence
Relentless darkness suffuses Shotgun Players’ ‘Black Rider’
Wilhelm is doomed from the moment he wants something that’s not in his nature. Hopelessly infatuated with Kätchen (the golden-voiced Noelle Viñas), he can have her only if he can prove his skills as a marksman and hunter, a tall order for a clerk who prefers his books and papers, who doesn’t so much hold a rifle as it holds him, who can barely keep his enormous Coke-bottle glasses perched atop his nose. His only recourse is to bargain with the devil, Pegleg (Rotimi Agbabiaka), a ruffle-sleeved, spikyheeled showman who peddles magic bullets, but only at a steep price.
Wilhelm’s neighbors in Shotgun Players’ “Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets” unwittingly do Pegleg’s bidding. Eternally tiptoeing about and spying on each other from behind a forest of leafless trees, they’re already treading in a netherworld. They don’t merely prize game and its carnage. They fetishize it, hanging a portrait of a master hunter as if it’s the village shrine, displaying dismembered animal parts, with brains and intestines spilling
out, as if they’re game show prizes.
In this respect, the show, directed by Mark Jackson and seen Friday, Nov. 24, constitutes a third riff on a seasonlong theme for the Berkeley company. Its “The Events” and “Brownsville Song (Bside for Tray)” also tackled the horrors of gun violence. This musical, with text by William S. Burroughs and music and lyrics by Tom Waits, offers the topic’s most grotesque refraction — which is both the show’s strength and its weakness.
From its opening moments, “Black Rider” is the carnival of your nightmares. Garish advertisements painted on Sean Riley’s set promise monsters like “The Bird Girl” or “The Human Pin Cushion.” Metallic chimes evoke the spokes of a bike wheel or a broken merry-go-round. Looney Tunes sound effects heighten every cartoonish gesture. When Wilhelm hunts, it’s as if he’s at a shooting gallery at a traveling fair, with wooden signs flipping around to reveal whether he won or lost.
But after first scenes ladle dread on so thickly, the show doesn’t always find new frontiers to take that feeling. Scenes with lovely but abstract lyrics — “Made of wet boots and rain/And shiny black ravens/On chimney smoke lanes” — and disjointed movement feel like empty aesthetics, mere set pieces. “Black Rider” seems to want foreboding to slowly, continuously curdle, but after a while, the relentless darkness undermines itself. Over and over again, it tells you that everything is terrible and distorted and that we’re all damned, our free will an illusion, always in thrall to our vices and weaknesses. What can you do with that but laugh or shrug?
We’re not meant to feel with characters as we are in a production with psychological realism. Jackson’s cast performs with Brechtian detachment, with eyes wide in terror, like they’re marionettes dancing at the caprice of an invisible puppeteer. But even if there’s not much to feel, occasionally, the sheer artistic integrity, the thoughtfulness with which Jackson constructs every aspect of a moment musters a sublime sensory power of its own, as when Wilhelm (Grace Ng), deep in his addiction to success, fires his last, deadliest bullet. Allen Willner’s lighting design trains the lights toward the audience, so that you, too, are implicated as both perpetrator and victim.
And in Grace Ng’s devastating performance of Wilhelm’s final song, “Lucky Day,” the suffering isn’t so much sad as horrific — which is perhaps the ultimate point of “Black Rider.” Our capacity for bloodshed vastly surpasses our capacity to feel.