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Quiet Obsessions, Unplugged: Aberdeen and The Animal Kingdom
A verse play about Kurt, and a therapy play about hurt.
In the saturated Northwestern gloom, Workman articulates a striking vision of death not as a desert or an abyss, but as a kind of flooded and moldering house — a wet, seeping place that “leaks into [the] living world” until you find yourself wading in the murk, feet pruny and freezing. The much-decorated director David Cromer played the titular tormented estate manager in that project, and in The Animal Kingdom he rejoins Serio to portray a man not at the churning center of the crisis but at its edge, tapping his foot and keeping his mouth shut, resisting the pull towards emotional responsibility and revelation with every muscle in his body. Like Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or Ruby Spiegel’s Dry Land or even Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, The Animal Kingdom picks a single location and gives us snapshots of a group of people playing out installments of the same scenario over time.
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