Siberian Mouth

Writers like Bower confound straightforward criticism. Calling out their abstraction or utter disinterest in conventional engagement is clearly beside the point—whatever that point may be. And however oblique the work, when it’s as crystalline and self-assured as this Bruised Orange offering, your inclination is more to puzzle over than judge it. That said, Bower’s blown-glass art-object of a play, despite some lovely high-wire acting, lurks just beyond where “tantalizing” would lie—though perhaps appropriately, given the unrequited love story at its source.

The tale, such as it is, begins as a riff on Dostoyevsky’s short story “White Nights,” a relatively romantic piece that might’ve been truly romantic in the hands of a Frenchman (or Chekhov), and which only a Frenchman could get excited about in the first place: Boy meets girl, girl longs for another, boy reunites girl and longed-for and is sad. But Bowers swiftly abandons most of this scenario, outside the sci-fi “Russian” signifier of a Dr. Moreau–like czar, turning the absent dreamboat into a wintry desert-wandering prophet, doggedly pursued by the lonely fiancée and lonely suitor to the horizon. Meanwhile, a profusion of marine-biology metaphors (among others) seems to tie things to Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth —but that’s about all we can tell you for sure. The surrealism, justified or not, is sometimes arresting, and Sonneville and Sheffer, sell every disjointed moment Bower throws at them.