By JERRY TALLMER
The brothers Grimm were pretty grim, but not so grim as to keep their evil witch alive for 400 years by having her replenish herself with the carved-out or hacked-off vitals — eyes, hands, heart, brain, intestines, sex organs, uteri — of boy and girl children who’ve wandered off into the woods. Little lost kids like Hansel and Gretel, for instance.
Kirk Wood Bromley and Jessica Grace Wing did that, in a show called “Lost,” he with words (book and lyrics), she with rapturous music that even Engelbert Humperdinck (the real one, 1854-1921) might applaud if he were still around.
Put those words and music together and, at the little third-floor Linhart Theater last month, they coalesced into the smash of smashes of the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival — such an SRO hit that “Lost” has now been brought back for two weeks, Sept. 4-14, to the 199-seat Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would indeed be more than a bit surprised if they dropped in at the Connelly. Their Hansel and Gretel are now Hanlon and Gabby, Ohio teenagers so pissed off at their hard-boiled B-movie stepmother (whose credo is “Kids grow up the hard way or the wrong way”) that they’ve somehow strayed way out into the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina/Tennessee, where their existence is made even more tenuous by evil witch Mamba and her co-conspirator, mad scientist Laborius.
The Grimms and composer Humperdinck might also be somewhat jolted by Kirk Wood Bromley’s take-no-prisoners poetry, which sets the tone, and the fatality, right from the start with:
Born to brutal beating
Bred into the blood.
All by birth bequeathing
Pathologia.
Among the gutted or damaged goods that Hanlon and Gabby encounter in the Great Smoky Mountains are:
Ivy, a winsome Salem victimized “witch” of the early 1700s (Hanlon falls in love with her); Silas, a strapping young Civil War combat veteran (Gabby falls in love with him); Mazy, an early 1800s slave girl; Little Wing, an Algonquin Indian of the 1600s; and White Fawn, who in alternate form is Virginia Dare of the Lost Colony at Roanoke, Virginia, first white child ever born on these American shores.
In short, a meshugas.
Jessica Grace Wing is dead now — criminally carjacked by colon cancer, at age 31, on July 19, 2003, three weeks before the opening at the Linhart (a death echoing that of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of “To Be Young Gifted and Black” who also died very young from cancer)— but Kirk Wood Bromley, whose prolific neo-Shakespearean output stunningly includes “The American Revolution,” is very much still with us and able to look back on the birth of “Lost” with some dispassion.
Soon after Ms. Wing’s arrival here from the West Coast in 1997, Bromley and Chad Gracia, a cofounder with him of Inverse Theater (and producer of “Lost”), had made her acquaintance in a bar on the Lower East Side. She and Bromley thereafter created a half-dozen plays-with-music — and now, around three years ago, they wanted to do a musical per se.
“We wanted to have a source text,” says Bromley, “and while we were talking about it, Josh Stafford, an actor in our company [Benedict Arnold in ‘The American Revolution’], suggested Hansel and Gretel. It came out of Josh’s interest in fairy tales, being lost in the wood, witches, body-snatching — macabre ideas that Jessica and I gravitated to naturally, through our penchant for the weird.
“We also wanted the piece to be contemporary American, which I guess came out of ourselves being young [Bromley is 37] and American and growing up pretty quickly and exposed to a number of things.”
There are three seemingly disparate threads in “Lost”: 1) the Hansel and Gretel legend; 2) the Tennessee/Kentucky backwoods; 3) the Lost Colony of Roanoke, where one or two hundred adventurers from Britain (plus newborn Virginia Dare) disappeared off the face of the earth circa 1587, leaving behind only the mysterious word “Croatoan” etched on an oak tree.
“You know, the Lost Colony and ‘Lost,’ “ says Bromley. “I gave the witch a back story as the only survivor of the Lost Colony — a woman who’s been keeping herself alive for 400 years off the body parts of lost children.”
What might be singled out as a thematic key to the whole project is an exclamation by Hanlon, he who’s slated to have his brain extracted: “So I am frozen in a state of mindless puberty” — followed by the retort from villainous Dr. Laborious: “Who isn’t?” Pause. “You’re supposed to laugh.”
And audiences do laugh. “They’ve loved that line,” Bromley said. “I guess maybe it really is central, because the play would not have taken place if Mamba were not frozen in a state of wanting to be ever young, ever sexy, ever fresh.”
One wondered if Mamba, the witch, might have any relationship to “Mamba’s Daughters,” the 1939 Charleston-based musical by Dorothy Heyward, DuBose Heyward, and Jerome Kern that had starred, among others, Ethel Waters, Canada Lee, Jose Ferrer, Anne Brown, and Reginald Beane.
Bromley was startled at the mention.
“I saw that show!” he said — i.e., an Off-Broadway revival of it, at HERE in 1997-’98. “In fact Billie James, of our company, was in it. A good show…. Yes, maybe the name Mamba did come into my head from that.”
And yes, Bromley has actually been in the Great Smoky Mountains.
“Went down there when I was writing this play. To Asheville, North Carolina. Spooky. Beautiful. Woods full of lots of ‘hollers.’ Seemed like a good place to get lost in. My family long ago came from the Kentucky region, and I’ve always fantasized about it.”
Where does the concept of stealing vital organs come from?
“Interesting question. It came up during dramaturgical meetings, brainstorming sessions, at the same time that Jessica was undergoing surgery to have her uterus taken out. Maybe a little weird as a token of Jessica’s dedication to her art, but she said — at least she said to me — that it was a great idea, she was all for it. Cool.”
Still and all, though Bromley is pleasantly surprised by the acclaim for “Lost,” and though producers are at this point starting to prowl around, “a part of me wonders if it would be getting such attention if Jessica” — much loved by one and all, for her beauty, her talent, her intellectual zest — “were still alive.”
When asked which came first, the words or the music, lyricist Sammy Cahn used to say: “What comes first is the telephone call.”
Kirk Wood Bromley says: “In this case, I can tell you clearly, the words came first. It’s how Jessica and I worked, through six shows. Which is not to say there wasn’t a lot of major adjustment. Words and music, words and music, words and music . . .
“Sometimes I’d give her a poem She’d read it and then say: ‘I like the first line.’ Example? A poem that begins: ‘Sometimes my soul uprears….’
“That line came to me when I was in California, looking at this giant mass of clouds in the sky — a mass of clouds looking down at me, cursing me. For what? Oh, for my life…. You know, for not living up to my potential….”
Trouble is, Kirk, if your potential is that unlimited….
