Review: In ‘Dark Noon,’ American History Is a Shoot-’Em-Up Western
The building boom in Dumbo, Brooklyn, may be waning, but onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse it flourishes. There, the hard-working seven-person cast of “Dark Noon,” which opened on Monday, spends much of the production’s 105 minutes assembling the edifices of westward-creeping American civilization, from home to brothel to church to jail. By the end, the playing space, like the once pristine frontier, is so overbuilt you can see little else.
The same holds for the play, written by Tue Biering for the Copenhagen-based company fit+foxy. Directed by Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu, “Dark Noon,” which has been touring Europe to great reviews since 2021, has a lot on its mind: the plight of migrants, the brutality of expansion, the slaughter of Native people, the culture of violence that shaped modern life. But in the end, it is too cluttered — stylistically, tonally, ideologically — to offer much insight.
If it is also too familiar, perhaps the saga of the United States is still news to those not steeped in it. (Biering is Danish; Mahlangu, like the cast, is South African.) I can imagine that if you’d never heard of the Trail of Tears, or read Howard Zinn, or questioned the bucolic Johnny Appleseed vision painted by children’s primers, you might have something to learn from its potted horse-opera history. As the pun on “High Noon” in the title suggests, “Dark Noon” means to rewrite the America of classic westerns by turning its heroic tropes into the tools of tragedy.
For most in the audience, that aim will prove entirely unobjectionable, for some even salutary. And as stagecraft, “Dark Noon” begins promisingly enough. Accompanied by distorted versions of Ennio Morricone’s theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” it cleverly evokes the haunted vastness of the West in the mid-1800s. (One actor rolls along the floor like a tumbleweed.) Blond wigs, whiteface and slow-motion gunfights draw nervous satirical laughs, as do live video segments that, among other things, frame the conflict between European settlers and Native Americans as a football game, complete with color commentary.
But as its nine “chapters” proceed from “Go West” to “End of the Wild,” with stops at gold, God and genocide, the history and satire begin to short circuit each other. Massive generalizations about diverse populations undermine more reasonable arguments about the harm done consciously by government policy. To say of the settlers — all of them — that “violence had become part of their DNA” is to approach a glib argument about heritable evil.
The live video likewise turns from comic relief to something much darker: a means of projecting the play’s violent imagery through the growing thicket of wood studs and door frames. If we are meant to take the fake blood and leechlike slurping of an episode involving “cannibalistic Europeans” as humor, we certainly cannot laugh at the tar-and-feathering of a petty thief and the realistic jailhouse rape that follows.
Eventually the brutality of the story fully infects the storytelling: a demonstration, perhaps, of Biering’s thesis that westerns not only reflected American life but “laid the foundation” for its “violent narratives.”
Even if you buy that argument, your tolerance for its expression may be greater than mine. I don’t feel improved, enlightened or even chastened by a furious man repeatedly cracking a bullwhip in my direction. Nor was I amused by the dragooning of theatergoers brought onstage to witness atrocities or, at another point, to be turned, without warning, into slaves at an auction. The close-ups of their faces, as they crumple or freeze in the act of realization, are devastating, and not just for those undersold at $1.
The devastation is of course the point. Everything “Dark Noon” chooses to explore figuratively was once quite literal to its victims. That there were millions of those victims lends moral importance to the endeavor — all the more reason it must be done well. But the play’s format seems to have gotten away from its values, creating a disturbing symbolic alliance between the storytellers and the perpetrators. It is no longer a representation of cruelty; it is cruel.
That’s a defensible aesthetic, or at any rate it has been defended. In the 1930s, an entire movement — the Theater of Cruelty — was formulated, in the words of its founder, Antonin Artaud, to “subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world.”
“Dark Noon” certainly does that. It is also, as Artaud specified, immersive, sensational, extreme. The problem is that most of us have already seen the world’s baseness — if not in person then in newspapers and on prestige cable television. Prosecuting history is the discipline of our age.
The question the play left me with was not whether the myth of exceptional American goodness needs to rewritten, but what role, if any, drama can meaningfully play in that process. It seems relevant that one edifice the actors do not build during “Dark Noon” is a theater.
Dark Noon
Through July 7 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.