Ellen Under Glass

HEART OF GLASS Defrin begins a spiritual journey.

I know I’m not that great with words,” says Jeremy (Mathews). It’s a mea culpa to his girlfriend Ellen (Defrin), but it might as well be House Theatre’s motto. That flaw is even more pronounced here because the company’s strong suit—the visual elements (namely, Rapley’s lovely choreography)—has a sophistication that surpasses the House’s usual rough-edged playfulness. Without question, that aesthetic maturity is a good thing—and ultimately what makes Ellen worth seeing. But while the company’s aesthetic has advanced, House’s weak suit, the story, has lagged behind. And because the distance between the visual and the verbal has grown, so has our dissatisfaction with the latter.

Rapley’s movement-based show is worthy of an hour’s sit for several reasons: Maria McCullough’s country-inflected tunes, Tom Burch’s set of helter-skelter windows. Most notable, Lee Keenan’s lighting tightly dovetails with Joe Griffin’s sound design. But then there’s Lobpries’s angsty-twentysomething plot: Ellen, knocked up by preacher’s-kid Jeremy, has a miscarriage, then walks through a mirror to meet virgin-whore pair St. Joan and Jezebel, who give Ellen enough woman power to return to her life and man. Because Lobpries’s dialogue says far less than Rapley’s expressive dance (strikingly executed by Defrin and Mathews), we realize that if Lobpries’s characters were mute, we’d lose some information about them but not an iota of their emotional journeys.

The House has hit a fork here: It can keep going down the Lookingglass path, enhancing its imagery while slighting its storytelling. Or it can seriously consider that words and ideas matter.—Novid Parsi