A Very Very Very Dark Matter

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Martin McDonough’s latest work, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is a deeply deeply deeply weird play. It gives us a Hans Christian Andersen whose stories are actually written by a Congolese woman he keeps in a box in his attic. A pygmy Congolese woman. A pygmy Congolese woman with one leg. (I can just imagine the casting director’s response to that request: “Get me a 3 foot black woman with one leg!”)



Oh yes, and we learn during Andersen’s notorious overlong visit to Dickens (whom he calls Darwin or, later, Chuck) that the woman’s sister, similarly imprisoned in England, wrote all of Dickens’s works.



McDonough is exploring interesting ideas: genocide in the Congo and the appropriation of other peoples’ stories by white European men. And there’s a lot to like in this outrageous, absurdist take on these ideas. It’s far more interesting to me, for example, than the very literal take on a similar idea in Meg Wolitzer’s novel and film, “The Wife.” And in spite of my disappointment that it wasn’t a more carefully crafted play, I quite enjoyed its gleefully absurdist violence.



The profoundly disturbing set and soundscape wonderfully evoke the terror at the heart of many of Andersen’s stories, as does the oblivious cruelty in Jim Broadbent’s portrayal. Andersen's dark apartment is dominated by the hanging 3-foot box in which he imprisons his "muse," as well as sinister marionettes hanging from the ceiling. We see a dark blue sky and cityscape out the attic windows, suggesting the possibility of a freer life, perhaps, but also the chilling Danish winter.



But McDonough can’t keep himself from egging the pudding, and both the plotting and the dialogue struck me as a bit lazy. His portrayal of Andersen as a selfish monster is often very funny, and McDonough is a master with black humor, making us laugh against our will. But the modern slang and the ubiquitous obscenities grow a bit old. To have Dickens's children address Andersen with "fuck" and "cunt" can be funny, but it's a pretty cheap laugh.



I loved McDonough’s Hangmen when I saw it in London three years ago. I was much more skeptical of Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, which, the more I thought about it, seemed to me incoherent--and offensive in the way it trivialized police violence against black people. He's a smart and talented playwright, but I think he's relying too much on his talent for shock. The plotting in A Very Very Very Dark Matter doesn't measure up to his best work.



A fun and provocative but ultimately disappointing work from a playwright who can do better.

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