Out of the fascination and confusion engendered by a single object, the skilled artist can create whole worlds of meaning—or at least of beauty. The artistic team clearly embraced this mantra in creating this semester’s production by the Theater Department, “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy,” which played last weekend in the CFA Theater. Written, directed, and (in part) performed by Visiting Artist in Theater and Pulitzer Prize finalist Rinde Eckert, the world premiere of “Old Wild Boy” told the story of a boy named Caleb, raised for the first several years of his life by a wolf mother before being captured by the hunters who killed her and shoehorned him into human society. Performed, in addition to Eckert, by a ten-member ensemble of Wesleyan students, “Old Wild Boy” as it stands is a work that contains moments of incredible beauty but ultimately fails to coalesce into a complete whole.
The show opened with a confused jumble of stools, amongst which Eckert strode with a vague sense of purpose. As the house began to settle, he sat before a tiny piano and gently began to play a lilting, plunky melody that silenced the audience within moments. Aside from the footsteps of late arrivals and the occasional awkward shuffle or cough, the audience sat in silence while Eckert’s music developed into a duet with student musical director Ben Zucker ’15.
Abstract music and stillness were hallmarks of the production, a highly ritualistic retrospective on the life of the wolf-boy. Images arose and disappeared from the ensemble as they might in a dream or hypnotic trance; in fact, many of the moving pictures presented were downright hypnotic. One early image consisted of Christine Treuhold ’13 darting across the stage after red scarves dropped by another ensemble member on a balcony. The only wolf to step out of the pack formed by a puppet procession across the stage, Treuhold chased the scarves; she gathered them and rolled in them until she was nearly obscured by them. It was a beautiful moment that quickly dissolved back into the narrative.
The puppets, designed by costume shop manager Christian Milik, were highlights of the production, as they seamlessly drew the audience into the world as seen through a young wolf’s eyes: rather than hunters, for example, we saw a pair of hats talking, the main identifiers for someone who has not learned to distinguish faces. Later, a nun’s wimple stood in for the nun herself, and massive, 15 foot tall puppets dressed as long-armed, suited executive types appeared to menace Caleb and the audience. Ensemble members operated the puppets while clad in black, hooded robes reminiscent of both bunraku-style Japanese puppetry and (in the pointed “ears” of the hoods) wolves.
Several other moments and performances were arresting: Matthew Krakaur ’14 had an incredible dance of self-discovery as the juvenile Caleb, exploring the geometry of a wooden box while accompanied by the rest of the ensemble rattling, tapping, and thumping other boxes. One entire segment, a masked sequence in which Caleb encounters wild dogs, was phenomenal—each dog was distinct, articulated, and even better, entertaining. Particularly strong were Sivan Battat ’15 as the imperious Dog King and Jiovani Robles ’13 and Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14 as comical dog professors. Treuhold appeared again in a mimed but hilarious sketch illustrating the Dog King’s disastrous predictions. Throughout the latter segment of the play Mikhail Firer ’13 was consistently solid: strong, stoic, and doubting as the adult, but not yet aged, Caleb.
Despite the beauty of these individual vignettes, though, the play as a whole sometimes lacked coherence. An earlier masked section, a traditional Greek invocation of the Prometheus story, was beautiful but felt rather abrupt. The dialogue, too, was frequently stilted; the spoken introduction to Caleb felt artificial and was disappointing dramatically (an instance, perhaps, of Eckert’s distinctive writing being crammed into the actors’ unaccustomed mouths?). Another longer segment, involving Caleb being studied by a psychiatrist, dragged in part because of the lumpy, sometimes florid dialogue and static staging.
The psychiatrist scene revealed a fundamental philosophical conflict of the production. “Old Wild Boy” explicitly rejected a linguistic and defined worldview in favor of the “natural,” undefined (and therefore unlimited) animal world; but the production frequently relied on language itself to explore these concepts. At the very least this tension puts strain on the play’s thesis, and I frequently felt “told” in a medium that could accomplish so much by showing.
A story told during the play (yet another distinct passage!) creates a dialogue between a wolf and a hunter whose ambition is to throw the whole world onto mankind’s fire in order to fill the empty space with things. When the wolf asks what will become of him when he too is finally thrown on the hunter’s fire, he is told that he will be “A dream of wolves made of smoke in a vast world made of smoke.” That image describes “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy” pretty exactly: ideas arise and disperse before our eyes that are haunting in their wildness and freedom. But try as we might, it’s difficult for us to find anything to hang onto in the smoke.
