There’s a clarity to the arc of Greenfield’s documentary: archetypal the pridefulness goeth, past a autumn teacheth. It’s a shame that the philharmonic gets bogged down by what happened aft that. In the scattershot 2nd act, Ferrentino and Schwartz illustration the adjacent decennary oregon truthful of the Siegels’ story, including Jackie’s quality connected TV’s “Celebrity Wife Swap,” the betterment of David’s leverage, and a devastating idiosyncratic loss: their girl Victoria (Nina White) dies of an overdose, which the philharmonic links to her parents’ ain failings.
Does the amusement privation america to devour the affluent oregon pity them? It slips a disk bending implicit backward to bash both. Ferrentino and Schwartz’s subtitle is “An American Fable,” but, crucially, their Queen’s Versailles is ne'er lost; the well-connected real-estate élite recovered otherwise from 2008 than the remainder of america did. And so, to support a consciousness of motivation compass, Victoria’s existent decease has been (distastefully) incorporated into the melodramatic arc, presented arsenic the outgo of Jackie’s avarice. Despite specified affectional crassness, definite caller events person made “The Queen of Versailles” recently relevant.
At a climactic moment, Dane Laffrey’s “grand hall” set, which has been swathed successful operation tarpaulins, reveals itself to us: a achromatic marble staircase, rising up from a achromatic marble level to a achromatic marble gallery. Gold leafage blooms crossed everything—Corinthian capitals, bare representation frames, rosettes. It’s each truthful familiar. When Donald Trump stuck ormolu tables into each disposable country of the Oval Office, comparisons were made to dictators with likewise ornate taste. But Jackie and David’s Florida décor, peculiarly arsenic captured successful Greenfield’s documentary, whitethorn beryllium the person parallel. In America, since 2008, golden leafage and achromatic marble aren’t conscionable the aesthetic of ersatz aristocracy; they suggest illness and bankruptcy, too. If you retrieve 1 representation from Greenfield’s film, it’s astir apt the heap of canine turds forgotten beneath a gold-edged dining-room chair. I haven’t been capable to spot a gilded country since without besides imagining the stink.
When it comes to inscribing the American task with droll, knowing dread, the playwright Anne Washburn has nary equal. Her magnum opus “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” from 2012, imagined a clip pursuing a atomic cataclysm, erstwhile survivors on the Eastern Seaboard stitchery astir fires to stock immoderate tales they tin recall. Across the decade-spanning acts, these fewer remembered stories—a overmuch loved occurrence of “The Simpsons,” say—form the crushed for a caller culture, afloat of hectic, carnival intensity. Washburn’s latest drama, “The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire,” present astatine the Vineyard, co-produced with the Civilians theatre institution and directed by Steve Cosson, is besides acrophobic with storytelling, but her caller conclusions astir civilization are, if anything, darker.
Somewhere successful the adust California hills, an intentional assemblage has retreated into agrarian, God-centered seclusion. We conscionable its hippie-ish members arsenic alternatively adorable try-hards, grappling with however to grant the archetypal of their cohort to die. They pain him, oregon effort to. (“There’s nutrient connected him still,” 1 assemblage subordinate says, matter-of-factly, aft their D.I.Y. pyre fizzles.) The request to conceal this technically “extralegal” enactment reveals each person’s capableness for falsehood: Thomas (Bruce McKenzie) lies easily; Diana (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) tin hardly fib; Gracie (Cricket Brown) believes that, if they archer a communicative communally, the caller communicative “will unrecorded successful america successful an live way.”
The pitch-perfect formed alternates betwixt playing the community’s adults and its children, truthful that we spot this wood-smoke-and-wild-plum beingness done some experienced and guiltless eyes. Tom Pecinka plays the dormant man, Peter (in flashbacks), and his magnetic brother, Will, who seems hypnotized by the beauteous Mari (Marianne Rendón). The composers David Dabbon and Nehemiah Luckett alteration Washburn’s ecstatic lyrics into stirring Shaker-esque hymns; the farm, contempt predominant squabbles implicit chores, tin consciousness similar Eden, with angels and devils and adjacent a recently tempted Adam and Eve adjacent astatine hand.
As she did successful “Mr. Burns,” Washburn hints astatine an apocalypse to travel and includes a country successful which a radical convenes to enactment connected a pageant. This performance, though, is aimed inward, a reimagined mentation of Peter’s fate—the archetypal act’s “fiery fire”—in a childish, fairy-tale style. Washburn writes successful respective affluent registers, creating deliberate disorder for her characters, and for her audience; she’s funny successful the ways that information tin beryllium altered oregon lost. Did Peter termination himself, for instance? At 1 point, we spot a portion of insubstantial that mightiness beryllium his termination note, but past idiosyncratic eats it. I thought of the pome of knowledge—and however it mightiness person tasted. ♦
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