In review: "Goodnight Sweet Thing"

Whitney Mallett reviews the sold out performance of a new book of poetry

Goodnight Sweet Thing
Directed by: Cristine Brache and Sigrid Lauren
Featuring: Emily Allan, Betsey Brown, and Joshua Weidenmiller
New York City | May 11, 2024

Goodnight Sweet Thing has the hazy logic of a dream, the familiar discomfort of childhood capitulation, and the cloying excess of overripe fruit. It adapts Cristine Brache’s book of poetry by the same name into a work of experimental theater, directed by Brache and Sigrid Lauren, which finds three performers (Emily Allan, Betsey Brown, and Joshua Weidenmiller) in a state of Lynchian hypnosis across three acts: a jello wrestling match, a therapist’s office, and a shoo-bee doo-bee stage show. Costume changes are worked into the onstage choreography. A referee is unmasked. A Young-Girl stamps her feet at the prospect of putting on a frilly period-piece dress. The performers begin stage right, they transition to stage left, and they finish in the center, the nostalgia of their singing and dancing bittersweet, and the final act’s simulation of balance and symmetry never quite achieving a sense of resolve. It’s a performance that gnaws at you. Throughout, trauma is recounted with a deadpan affect, and certain phrases are repeated enough times that their meaning is turned inside out. One such sticky line recited over and over: “I can look into anybody’s eyes and borrow the ache and promise of a daydream.”

On the page Brache’s poetry is remarkable for its directness. The world she portrays is sometimes bleak, the way everything looks blank-white when you step out into the bright sun and your eyes haven’t adjusted yet. But it’s never cold. There’s an intimacy to how she uses language. It feels personal, even if we only get glimpses. Shocks of familiarity, fragmented. In the performance adaptation of Goodnight Sweet Thing’s poems, this splintered sentimentality sits inside a container of spectacle, the three-act structure focalizing three rituals that stage an expression of interiority for an audience. But also three rituals of catharsis that are codified to such a degree that we become skeptical whether the demands of how we’re expected to perform have contaminated the sincerity of the feeling to begin with.

— Whitney Mallett

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