BRATTLEBORO — Running on Top of the Water (billed as “a play of Mania and Mastery”), written, produced, and acted by Charles Monette, with words of Robert Lowell, and directed by Miles Keefe, had its world premiere at the Hooker-Dunham Theater on April 11.
Monette's nuanced portrait of Lowell's life is brilliant and sets a stunning familiarity with the world of this quintessential New England poet, aristocrat, and cultural icon.
Collaborative artifice and thespian intimacy explore the relationships among art, human suffering, war and false patriotism, and the complexity of unbridled passionate relationships in dark times.
Monette and company capture Lowell's life struggle. Scenes of despair melt the boundary between illusion and reality, for this witness swept away by what fine actors seek but rarely achieve - to be catapulted into aching relevance to present conditions.
The music, lighting and design, scene design, and the set enhance the poetic beauty and tortuous world that Monette's Lowell realizes.
Lowell abhorred the violent excesses of World War II (carpet bombing of Germany and Japan) and went to prison. Running on Top of the Water is a metaphor for now. The beauty of his poetry, the depth of his suffering, the integrity of his resistance to society's madness - all render a cathartic tradition upon which we can draw.