EMMA MEAD

 

                                   by Julia Polinsky

 

Once the Hollywood machine gets hold of something like the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, or, in this case, the Oz books, it’s easy for us to forget how dark children’s stories are. How they come from spaces of loss and fear. Tales of orphaned or abandoned children, slavery, evil, wicked step-parents, cruel punishments, blood, burning: Hollywood makes them cute. So a show like The Woodsman, with its unflinching staging of terror and pain, comes as a bit of a shock. In a good way.

 

Briefly, The Woodsman tells the backstory of the Tin Man of Oz, and how he lost his heart. It hews closely to the original text, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which the Tin Man tells Dorothy, that he was born the son of a woodsman, and grew up to become a woodchopper. He fell in love, and the Munchkin girl he loved promised to marry him as soon as he built a house for her.

 

But in this show, the girl he loves is the slave of the Wicked Witch of the East, who becomes enraged, and enchants the Woodsman’s axe so that it cuts off his limbs, one by one. He has them replaced with tin arms and legs, and even his head with a tin head, and still loves his girl, as she still loves him. But the Witch, determined to destroy his love, has the axe cut his body in two, and when he comes together as a tin man, his heart is gone.

James Ortiz, who wrote and created The Woodsman, stars as Nick Chopper. He opens the evening with the whole cast, telling the tale of once-upon-a-time, setting the scene with a lovely wordpainting of the beauties of the Munchkin country.

 

They are almost the last words spoken for the rest of the evening. The rest of the story is told with gesture, melody, movement, and sound, but not words. We don’t need the words. Every movement has its meaning, and the meanings are always clear. The evocative set, also by Ortiz, and the terrific puppets can’t speak for themselves, but they tell the story in silence.

 

Of course, it’s not really silence. The cast creates sound of wind through the trees in the forest; the snapping and popping of a fire. Violin accompaniment, alternately mournful/playful, (composed by Edward W. Hardy, beautifully played by Naomi Florin), and the rest of the non-verbal vocalizations by cast members: all these sounds create the world of the play every bit as much as costume/lights/set/puppets.

 

Will Gallacher, James Ortiz, Eliza Martin Simpson      photo by Matthew Murphy

 

About those puppets: think Bunraku, not Avenue Q; these are not hand puppets with comic faces, but almost human. The Witch puppet breathes evil with her every gesture. The Tin Man exudes sorrow. Even the crows embody malice. The cast members who move these puppets – to call them “puppeteers” would diminish their contributions –give the puppets character, and disappear themselves.  Only the Kalidah fails to live up to the standard; it feels under-rehearsed, incomplete.

 

Lighting design, by Catherine Clark and Jamie Roderick, contributes as much intensity to The Woodsman as the set design, also by James Ortiz, an evocation of “forest” that owes much to Dante’s selva oscura.

 

Oh, about the Woodsman’s heart: that heart, worn on a chain, around his neck, then given to his lady love, is the source of some of the loveliest gestures in the show. The woman he loves, Nimmee (the luminous Eliza Martin Simpson), speaks the only line of text in the show, when she shouts, “Please!”

 

That one word says volumes. I’ll say no more about what happens next, only that the show ended differently than I expected. After the grimness and loss, the final moments speak to a better future (within the Oz world, at least; if you know the book, you’ll recognize what’s implied).

 

At just over an hour’s playing time, The Woodsman may seem like a bonbon, nothing much, but the surprising emotional impact makes it an hour well spent. A note about taking kids: the company says they welcome children over 8 years old, but The Woodsman may be a bit intense for 3^rd graders, and there’s no predicting when a kid will get bored.

 

The Woodsman

75 minutes, no intermission

New World Stages, 340 W. 50^th St.

M,W, Th, F, 8pm; Sat, 2:30pm & 8pm; Sun, 3pm & 7:30pm

At New World Stages

340 W 50^th St.

212-239-6200

Tickets, $45-85: telecharge.com

http://www.thewoodsmanplay.com