BRILLIANT TRACES
The problem is, a lot of garbage comes out with the good stuff. Fornes merely teaches how to unlock the imagination and produce original dialogue; shaping that dialogue into a play requires another step, a crucial, private step that transforms the raw material into drama.
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Johnson must have used Fornes’s technique, or one very much like it, for Brilliant Traces begins with a wonderfully startling dreamlike image. As the wind howls outside, someone starts pounding on the door of a remote, ramshackle cabin. “Let me in! I’m a person in serious trouble!” a woman’s voice cries. Suddenly, the door bangs open and in steps a young woman–wearing a wedding gown. A figure shrouded in a blanket rises from the bed and confronts her. The play begins.
Brilliant Traces might have been saved by top-notch acting. The play received a respectful review in the New York Times when it was mounted in New York two years ago with Piven Theatre Workshop’s Joan Cusack and Steppenwolf’s Kevin Anderson. But the two Griffin Theatre actors–Eric Zudak and Jean Elliott Campbell–stick too close to the dialogue. Under the direction of Richard Barletta, they don’t come up with any stage business to add depth or coherence to their roles. This quickly reveals the inanity of the play, and Bitter Traces bogs down in phony angst and lame humor.
Brilliant Traces is supposed to be about alienation and the difficulty of connecting with other people. The title comes from a poem by Avah Pevlor Johnson called “Individuation”: “Let my scars leave brilliant traces, / for my highborn soul seeks its hell– / in high places.”
