Kristin Chenoweth’s Uneven Gilt Trip in “The Queen of Versailles”
There’s a clarity to the arc of Greenfield’s documentary: first the pride goeth, then a fall teacheth. It’s a shame that the musical gets bogged down by what happened after that. In the scattershot second act, Ferrentino and Schwartz chart the next decade or so of the Siegels’ story, including Jackie’s appearance on TV’s “Celebrity Wife Swap,” the recovery of David’s leverage, and a devastating personal loss: their daughter Victoria (Nina White) dies of an overdose, which the musical links to her parents’ own failings.
Does the show want us to eat the rich or pity them? It slips a disk bending over backward to do both. Ferrentino and Schwartz’s subtitle is “An American Fable,” but, crucially, their Queen’s Versailles is never lost; the well-connected real-estate élite recovered differently from 2008 than the rest of us did. And so, to maintain a sense of moral compass, Victoria’s real death has been (distastefully) incorporated into the dramatic arc, presented as the cost of Jackie’s avarice. Despite such emotional crassness, certain recent events have made “The Queen of Versailles” newly relevant.
At a climactic moment, Dane Laffrey’s “grand hall” set, which has been swathed in construction tarpaulins, reveals itself to us: a white marble staircase, rising up from a white marble floor to a white marble gallery. Gold leaf blooms across everything—Corinthian capitals, empty picture frames, rosettes. It’s all so familiar. When Donald Trump stuck ormolu tables into every available corner of the Oval Office, comparisons were made to dictators with similarly ornate taste. But Jackie and David’s Florida décor, particularly as captured in Greenfield’s documentary, may be the closer parallel. In America, since 2008, gold leaf and white marble aren’t just the aesthetic of ersatz aristocracy; they suggest collapse and bankruptcy, too. If you remember one image from Greenfield’s film, it’s probably the pile of dog turds forgotten beneath a gold-edged dining-room chair. I haven’t been able to see a gilded room since without also imagining the stink.
When it comes to inscribing the American project with droll, knowing dread, the playwright Anne Washburn has no equal. Her magnum opus “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” from 2012, imagined a time following a nuclear cataclysm, when survivors along the Eastern Seaboard gather around fires to share whatever tales they can recall. Across the decade-spanning acts, these few remembered stories—a much loved episode of “The Simpsons,” say—form the ground for a new culture, full of hectic, carnival intensity. Washburn’s latest drama, “The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire,” now at the Vineyard, co-produced with the Civilians theatre company and directed by Steve Cosson, is also concerned with storytelling, but her new conclusions about culture are, if anything, darker.
Somewhere in the dry California hills, an intentional community has retreated into agrarian, God-centered seclusion. We meet its hippie-ish members as rather adorable try-hards, grappling with how to honor the first of their cohort to die. They burn him, or attempt to. (“There’s meat on him still,” one community member says, matter-of-factly, after their D.I.Y. pyre fizzles.) The need to conceal this technically “extralegal” action reveals each person’s capacity for falsehood: Thomas (Bruce McKenzie) lies easily; Diana (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) can barely fib; Gracie (Cricket Brown) believes that, if they tell a story communally, the new story “will live in us in an alive way.”
The pitch-perfect cast alternates between playing the community’s adults and its children, so that we see this wood-smoke-and-wild-plum life through both experienced and innocent eyes. Tom Pecinka plays the dead man, Peter (in flashbacks), and his magnetic brother, Will, who seems hypnotized by the beautiful Mari (Marianne Rendón). The composers David Dabbon and Nehemiah Luckett transform Washburn’s ecstatic lyrics into stirring Shaker-esque hymns; the farm, despite frequent squabbles over chores, can feel like Eden, with angels and devils and even a newly tempted Adam and Eve close at hand.
As she did in “Mr. Burns,” Washburn hints at an apocalypse to come and includes a scene in which a group convenes to put on a pageant. This performance, though, is aimed inward, a reimagined version of Peter’s fate—the first act’s “fiery fire”—in a childish, fairy-tale style. Washburn writes in several rich registers, creating deliberate confusion for her characters, and for her audience; she’s interested in the ways that truth can be altered or lost. Did Peter kill himself, for instance? At one point, we see a piece of paper that might be his suicide note, but then someone eats it. I thought of the apple of knowledge—and how it might have tasted. ♦
