By Ernest Kearney — The dark wooden canopy of the Appalachia Valley, known as The Great Valley, shrouds a deep and massive scar that cuts across the eastern landscape of America. As the titular character In Some Dark Valley: The Testament of Reverend Brand, Writer/Performer Robert Bailey succeeds from his first moment on stage in capturing that unknown terror which the vastness of wilderness has held for humanity from Oedipus and Dante to Dorothy and The Evil Dead.
Man’s ability to have unwavering faith in what is beyond his senses to affirm is one of life’s great mysteries. Another is his capacity to lose that faith. There are echoes of this in the story Robert Bailey shares with his audience; that of a man confident of the divinity within himself who is then destroyed by that deception.
Bailey commands the elongated stage of the Madnani masterfully, with a robust physical presence while he envelopes the theatai in the essence of postbellum America through his sincere singing of hymns from the period.
What most impressed me about In Some Dark Valley was how Bailey, through the enfolding of his language, succeeded in conveying the preeminence of the spoken word held in the nineteenth century.
It is hard for our modern sensibilities to perceive the power that words once possessed. Language has been weakened today by our visualization of it. There are few places in the twenty-first century where one can walk without being awashed in the representations of words; digital billboards, towering print advertisements, flashing neon signs, and typographical logos converting words into art.
In the nineteenth century, words had power through their purity and their potency was undiluted. The demarcation point for this change can be found in the comparison of two short turns of phrases; Today, we go “to see a play.” But, from the time of the ancient Greek stage until only the last century, theatergoers went to “hear a play.”
Bailey captures the period’s respect for language through his characters’ usage. They choose their words carefully to communicate their thoughts with clarity; as when Agnes, the Reverend’s young wife, seeks to warn her husband of his faltering faith, “You bruise where you oughta caress.”
Or when Brand realizes what his failure to live his belief has brought him to, “a loneliness so deep it didn’t have no depth.”
As directed by Billy Siegenfeld and produced by Cori Allison, Robert Bailey’s In Some Dark Valley: The Testament of Reverend Brand has but one flaw that I could see; it was limited to only three performances thus denying more Fringe audiences the opportunity of experiencing this exceptional and exquisite work.
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In Some Dark Alley: The Testament of Reverend Brand
Playing during Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024
Sunday June 16 2024, 2:00 PM | 65 mins
at
The Madnani Theater (Main Space)
6760 Lexington Ave
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