Explore The Strangeness of Being with ‘Inside the Wild Heart’ (The NoPro Review)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
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October 22, 2018
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5 min read

The surreal sandbox show by Group.BR about Clarice Lispector returns

A man and a woman sit at a small table before me in a Manhattan apartment kitchen. They drink black coffee.

Both ovens on the wall blink “00:00” incessantly. One of the walls of the kitchen is covered entirely in a floral pattern, but with paper eyes pasted all over it. There are noises emanating from the room down the hall. And a video projector is showing a video of… a chicken.

The date is going badly. All of the man’s attempts to start a conversation are totally misinterpreted by the woman.

This goes on for some time.

He finally exclaims, “Look, I’m leaving because you’re impossible!”

She says, dumbfounded, “But all I know how to do is be impossible! What can I do to become possible?”

And so I find myself deep in the bizarre, wonderful world of Clarice Lispector as brought to life in the production Inside the Wild Heart, containing eleven parallel plays, all drawn from the critically acclaimed author’s essays, short stories, and novels. The performance takes place at Aich Studios, a brownstone built in 1848 and converted to a foundry at the turn of the century. This building is photographer Clara Aich’s multi-story home and the production company has had the opportunity to take over the entire space, which includes a large loft, two separate apartments, and plenty of interesting nooks and crannies filled with art.

Having full reign of the entire building means that participants are also “inside” the show the second they step inside the building; I arrived fifteen minutes early to find all of the performers already in character and interacting with the audience members or performing odd rituals silently.

Everywhere, surreal symbols from Lispector’s work and life ooze out of the house: feathers, cockroaches, eggs, feathers, roses, pills, mirrors, alcohol, cigarettes, and typewriters. I find a grand piano wrapped entirely in a floral pattern. A blank wall on an outdoor balcony invites participation with the single phrase “I want to write pure movement” and a bucket of markers nearby. A series of telephone handsets dangles under a staircase; voices inside all recite Portuguese. A TV in one of the rooms shows an archival video interview with the author; meanwhile, handwritten quotes pepper the space. I note most memorably the phrase “I don’t regret it: a thief of roses has one hundred years of forgiveness” scrawled next to a bedroom loft full of rose-inspired art. Clarice, as she is known to her fans, has truly taken over the entire space.

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The audience is invited to explore and follow their curiosity during the performance. Luckily, the show’s program also contains a map of the entire house including the nearly two dozen installations inspired by her writings — there’s even one in every restroom — which made it easy to get my bearings as I moved from room to room. (Do wear comfy shoes, and watch your step on the narrow, steep staircases, which can get jammed up during the performance.)

The setup of the space also means that multiple characters and scenes are always colliding in a beautiful sort of chaos. I find myself observing a young, handsome couple arguing about tranquilizers and the tragic nature of something that has both a beginning and an end versus something with no beginning and no end, in the living room. Meanwhile, a man in the bedroom loft above me prepares to blindly walk down the stairs while balancing an open book on his face. I step next door into the kitchen, and a woman in a bath robe begins a hilarious monologue on Sveglia and the nature of God from “Report on the Thing.” She maintains eye contact with me the entire time, drawing me closer with every word. Then the first couple waltzes in and pours themselves some water from a pitcher, as if she wasn’t there at all. On occasion, a door slams on another floor or the shouts of someone nearby bleed through the walls, but it all feels like part of the same fever dream.

“I want to capture the present. The Present escapes me.” — Clarice Lispector

The most compelling moments of Inside the Wild Heart occur when the performers directly channel Lispector, either by addressing the room as the author or through one of her characters,which are often thinly-veiled version of herself. Group.BR takes her poetic, unsettling source material and brings it to life in all its messy glory. And don’t despair if you’ve never read Lispector’s work. A familiarity with her writings isn’t needed to enjoy the show as the majority of the text is spoken in English (in a previous version, it was mostly Portuguese). I was entranced by the aforementioned essay on Sveglia, the description of the shooting death of a thug, and the confessions of a writer who is afraid to write. The actors bounce about bedrooms and living rooms, performing inches away from the audience. The performances are no holds barred and the strength of Lispector’s prose really shines in this setting.

That said, Inside the Wild Heart can be a challenging show. Some patrons unfamiliar with Lispector may find her too academic or aggressively weird or contradictory. The audience will find themselves drifting in and out of various stories without a unifying narrative tying them all together. These characters are not connected by conventional plot or narrative; they are connected mostly only by emotional or mental state or obssession. Throughout the night, I witnessed gripping meditations on art, creation, marriage, death, birth, God, and so much more—all universal subjects.

Inside the Wild Heart is not about any one thing in particular in the same way that life isn’t about any one thing in particular. Lispector’s eccentric, stream-of-conscious style lends itself well to an immersive adaptation. She finds ways to articulate the very essence of existence. Her words vibrate with intensity; they almost scream out for attention. It’s been written that Lispector had a lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant.” Critics have observed that you don’t simply read Clarice, you experience Clarice. How fitting it is, then, to see her words come to life in this enthralling immersive show.

Inside the Wild Heart continues through November 18. Tickets are $45, with an early bird discount for tickets purchased more than two weeks ahead of time.

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