Aoife Duffin             photos by  Mihaela Bodlovic.

 

                                By Eugene Paul

 

Curious how trends seem to compound.  There have been countless plays, workshops, lectures, even performance artists on the sexual abuse of very young girls and the enduring effects on their lives. So it is not truly surprising that A Girl is a Half-formed Thing has come to New York after lustrous attention in European theatrical venues.

 

 

 Remarkable Aoife Duffin’s  fixating performance, different as it is, of what a very young girl’s Irish life  deals her sexually is in sharp cintrast to Michelle Williams’ searing portrayal a few blocks away  (Blackbird) of what an American child’s life has dealt her character, sexually.  There’s a world of difference, yet, inevitably much the same.

 

The crucial difference shows up immediately. We’re experiencing it through Aoife Duffin’s superb physical artistry, telling us of the young girl’s battering by the life around her as she experiences it, reacts to it, tells us – or tells herself – what she sees, what her body is feeling, what she cannot name from the first time her uncle raped her as a little one. Although she does not call it rape.  She uses her own made up language to the world around, about that torment  of a mother, that sad, forlorn thing her brother. And then, the litany of men and boys who use her, to fill her need, their need.

 

Director Annie Ryan – she also wrote the stage adaptation of Eimar McBride’s prize winning book –  shaped this cry to the world into a demand for the theater through the path closest to her own visions: deep physicality, as many great artists do, not internally, as other great artists do, plus intellectually. We get absolutely blown away and hunger for more but mostly, though, we are content to admire the extraordinary Aoife Duffin.  There isn’t a single, wasted movement in the whole of her performance, from her searching toes to her vivid head.  Clever Lian Bell has designed a setting that accommodates all of Duffin’s wealth of art:  she has covered the entire stage with a simple, crushed carpet suggesting an open field, seductively sensuous to Duffin’s feet, to her whole body. Lighting designer Sinead Wallace gives Duffin a knife blade of light through the field to a puddle of light center stage, every thing Duffin needs.

 

 All the rest comes from her, all the characters of the people she has in her ken, all the directions from one to the other, all the voices she hears and gives back to us, all through her terrible early years.  We wonder what future could save her, we see that that is of no concern, no comprehension on her part.  She gets what she gets, becomes what she becomes, and dreams not, wonders not.  She is, after all, a thing, a half formed Thing. 

 

Director Ryan has shaped Duffin’s performance exquisitely, has remained true to author McBride’s voice in creating this piece for the stage but  Ryan has not  created a play, has not given McBride’s recounting of a half-formed Thing  the  vital hook of suspense of a true story teller, instead, stayed respectful to  the book’s design. She lays her theatrical hooks differently, leaving us to work our way into the Thing’s singular exposition before us even as the Thing is becoming realer and realer to us. A girl. We are struck with admiration.

                                                         

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. At the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street, near 10^th Avenue. Tickets: $25. 866-811-4111. 85 min. thru Apr 30