An adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Wood Calls Out to Wood is a painting presented as a play, a landscape turned into a soundscape. Written in language that is both precise and deeply silly, the play experiments with the possibilities of combination–of single syllables combining to make words and single people combining to make couples. At first, the audience encounters it as they would a picture hanging on a distant wall, in large swaths of color and pattern. When taking a closer look, however, strange Boschian beings begin to emerge: Two horses in a neigh-scent relationship, a vacant treehouse in need of a tenant, and a human with a grape for a head.

A rose of a show is up at The Tank, Wood Calls Out To Wood, written by Corinne Donly and directed by Sarah Hughes. A work of such generous inquiry and soft choices is a blessing to patient spirits. The complicated profundity of it will wash over you not at any moment in the theater, but on reflection, as the synchronicity and complicity of your own relationship to nature, phenomenal narrative, and destiny dawns on you to uncover the latent, insouciant sangfroid that was always there — that can’t help but be there, wherever and whoever and whyever you are. This text. The script, an adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th-century triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” has a breathing pattern that is remarkably chill and thoughtful, easy to follow yet constantly reinventing. Though these are very much words that come together to make strong ideas, in space and time they speak to their more subtle and potent touches. Donly writes animal sounds to be words and writes words to act as action; writes active memory and dual presence and gives voice not to feeling but to transformation, which is a type of feeling come to think of it. It is an art that can only be done in the theater, this …Read more