Theater review – Night Fires

A sublime show to packed houses in Middlebury

Deborah Lubar (l) and Marianne Lust (Photo courtesy of Buzz Kuhns Photography.)

By Kate and Bill Schubart
For The Record

When it comes to theater criticism, neither of us are likely to gush, but we aren’t blasé either. We’ve both loved theater all of our lives and seen a great deal of it – as well as participating backstage and on stage in our younger years.

Last Saturday we went off to Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater to see Marianne Lust and Deborah Lubar’s annual winter solstice production, Night Fires. This year it was introduced as “a celebration and honoring of the darkness itself as well as the light, this year’s Night Fires, in music, dance and words is about heroes: those who feed life - all kinds, all ages, public ones and private ones ...”

We are still, days later, in the thrall of what we later agreed was one of the finest pieces of theater either of us has ever seen in our respective eighty years. Driving home to Hinesburg we could talk of nothing else. That aesthetic hangover lasted well into the evening and was our first topic of discussion on waking.

But this was not the intellectual-critical analysis we often bat around after seeing a new theater work. It became clear, as we did a sort of verbal waltz, that we were both still deeply immersed in the experience, one which gave voice to a vast range of human experience, both happy and sad, kind and cruel, beautiful and agonizing, but always in their own way brave, we came to realize. The varieties of bravery stay with us and, in these times, have had the effect of cutting through the fear and anxiety and the sense of helplessness abroad in the land.

We can’t do the production justice simply by describing its many performance components. Let’s call it a rich tapestry of the human experience. Though drawn from a diverse international selection of poetic, musical and theatrical resources, the classical pantheon of artists is largely absent.

Instead, we’re drawn back to the many singers and poets who have emerged from indigenous and popular cultures: Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and more recent voices like Iris DeMent, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, Sinead O’Connor, Sharon Olds, Brandi Carlisle, Tom Waits, Galway Kinnell and Jane Kenyon.

Their work becomes source material for a celebration of darkness and light. Along with the voices of poets and writers of note there are others like that of Alexei Navalny – voiced by actor and minister Co’Relous C. Bryant – that speak of the commitment to standing up for human rights even if the penalty is, as it was in his case, death. In another segment, we hear the words of Dr. Melba Patillo Beals, from an interview on the radio program On Being with Krista Tippett, as she tells of growing up living with fear every day.

And there is the poet Naomi Shihab Nye whose poem “Cross That Line” commemorates Paul Robeson’s singing on the American side of the Canadian border to an audience of both nations because the U.S. and Canadian authorities had collaborated to deny him entry. The poem ends with these lines:

Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

We agreed that one of the great mysteries of a transformative work on stage is the impossibility of conveying it fully, whether in person or in a written review, to those who haven’t seen it, and so we can’t help but wish the work could have been filmed while it was being performed, even if that could only capture a small part of the impact that being present makes possible.

But this year’s Night Fires was in essence a reminder of the power of being present both for actors and audience. There’s an intimacy and an immediacy that cannot be experienced secondhand. We can only hope for more performances as time goes on. And we thank the local actors and Marianne Lust and Deborah Lubar, the creators, for so wonderfully altering our perceptions of the light and dark of winter in our world. And reminding us that light prevails.

With good reason, all shows sold out quickly. We’d bought tickets early and got there early, only to then find a handful of seats left.

The depth and reach of this extraordinary theatrical event will remain with us in perpetuity, seducing us back into future conversations, something we can’t say about very many of the theater performances we’ve attended. Sincere condolences if you missed it. Get your tickets early next year and let’s hope for more performances.