Phoenix Theatre world premiere: Working out physical and spiritual woes in 'The Body'

The body, twinned source of Plato's perpetual mind-body problem — and, coached by death,  the eventual

Joe struggles to move crate left on his front porch.

winner in that tussle — provides the title of a new play by Steve Moulds that opens Phoenix Theatre's 40th season.

"What do you want to do with the body?" may be the ultimate question any parent dreads hearing. Even worse is coming up with an answer. The painfully extruded answer in one fracturing family occupies the whole of this one-act show, made especially creepy by the technical wizardry available on the Russell Stage. Dire physical realities accomplish their inevitable mind screw-ups, which theater rushes to realize.

Mike Lamirand's sound design grabs the attention before the first speeches of the two characters, anxious stepfather Joe (Bill Simmons) and nine-year-old Abby (Paige Elisse), offspring of Joe's wife's previous marriage. Their initial dialogue is deliberately sit-com bland, evoking only everyday tensions between a bored preteen and an eager-to-please adult ostensibly in charge. The wife is cryptically absent for a few days in another city, but ominously influential.

The sound environment rarely lets up in wrapping the audience in mystery, and Michael Jackson's lighting design follows suit. Constance Macy directs the cast insightfully in their increasingly overwrought roles. A painful past event has widened fissures in the marriage during the pandemic shutdown, and only a large unexpected crate on the doorstep seems capable of providing either a total break or the path to healing. 

It's the kind of play that you have to peel away layers from in retrospect, as you do in genre fiction like the detective story.  It takes a while to connect mysterious loud offstage bangs with dialogue in which Joe and Abby recall the absent mother/wife's habit of slamming kitchen cabinet doors when she's upset. The same applies to Joe's mission to get rid of Abby's stuffed animals, which aren't in the way yet seem to represent useless clutter to her mom. Why does the doll from the crate that Abby grows fond of need those long-neglected toys? We eventually find out. 

On it goes, and looking back over the 90-minute play, I may have missed a few red herrings as well — sound or lighting moments that are not meant to lead anywhere. And of course, there are mysterious dream episodes that are partly explained in advance but are presented as puzzles. The minds of both characters are vexed by something that needs to manifest itself before it is understood and dealt with emotionally.

Bill Simmons is among the area's best actors in roles that sketch the surface of the ordinary, then plunge toward breakup and fragmentation. His embattled auto-shop proprietor in "North of the Boulevard" (2014) remains a memorable example. In "Halftime with Don" (2018), an injury-demented former football player's personality has disintegrated from the start, but Simmons' performance shed light on what Don was like when he had it all together. In "The Body" the actor manages a similar stress-ruined personality believably.

Joe bonds with stepdaughter Abby over board game. 

Only the stepdaughter, represented well by Paige Elisse in her preteen fretfulness and young-adult acquired wisdom, can see Joe through. Abby has long enjoyed games and has a penchant for difficulty and imaginative stretching. So she finds a way to win, building on messages from the doll and the manual of diagrams she and Joe have pored over. On an intimate, domestic scale, she has unlocked the clue to Joe's tortured phantasmagoria and solidified her love for him. Elisse's performance was illuminating.

Moulds' access to the surrealist mode, so well fleshed out by the Phoenix, brings to mind Arthur Rimbaud's declaration in "Illuminations," repeated significantly in Benjamin Britten's translated setting of the poetry as "I alone have the key to this parade, this savage parade."

 "The Body" is a problem play that leans on genre fiction as well as issues that have recently been highlighted with political attacks on women's reproductive health. It fights its way past such obstacles through a brilliant production as the savage parade goes by. 

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]