NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Please don’t call him a D.J. Really, I mean it, just don’t. This is one guy you should never, ever tick off. But you have to say that Deon, the feral young man at the center of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Girls” at the University Theater here, sure knows how to play the right music.
I’m talking about the kind of music that makes people not just want to, but have to dance. And get down. And go wild, wilder, wildest. And just possibly shed some blood.
Deon is short for Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry. And in this lush, bloated party of a production from Yale Repertory Theater, Deon (a feline Nicholas L. Ashe) shows up in fishnets and dreads in a middle-American nature preserve to allow women throughout the centuries to get a bit of their own back while letting down their hair.
Directed to overwhelm by the talented Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole,” “Red Speedo”) — with choreography by the hot dance master of the moment, Raja Feather Kelly — “Girls” is a latter-day variation on one of the strangest and most disturbing of all Greek tragedies, Euripides’ “The Bacchae.” Jacobs-Jenkins’s version turns the tale into a silly but serious revenge fantasy for all women who ever squirmed under the crushing weight of a patriarchy.
And maybe I’m over-projecting, but doesn’t that make this seem, at this moment in time, like an Everywoman kind of play?
Jacobs-Jenkins, who has one of the most antic imaginations at work in the theater today, loves to riff on classics both venerable and hoary, to turn them inside out and see how they fit our own age. With “Appropriate,” he threw the plot of every American dysfunctional (white) family drama into one big pot and let it boil over.
His “Everybody” imagined the 15th-century Everyman morality plays as a kind of cosmic, 21st-century lottery — not just for its characters but for the actors playing them. His masterpiece, however, remains “An Octoroon,” which took a 19th-century melodrama about an interracial love affair and transformed it into a searingly self-conscious exploration of the perception and performance of race.
Though it nearly matches “An Octoroon” in pure theatrical chutzpah, “Girls” doesn’t have the same thought-through consistency. The show exudes an arch, collegiate quality as it blurs classical and contemporary frames of reference, and can feel literal-minded in brain-freezing ways. On occasion, it buckles and sags under the colossal breadth and weight of its intellectual hedonism.
Fortunately, “Girls” doesn’t give you much time for academic reflection. At its best, it generates the heady disorientation of a big, boozy bash where you feel you’ve met everybody before (even if you haven’t) and all the partygoers seem like a whole lot of fun (until, abruptly, they don’t).
Like the original “Bacchae,” “Girls” uses the eternal plot spring of a stranger who comes to town to right some wrongs. In this case, Deon has returned to the claustrophobic American village where his mother was murdered by the jealous wife of a famous television personality. (That would be Deon’s father, who in the original Greek myth is Zeus.)
Deon explains his complicated back story directly to the audience, from the sylvan mountainside (a hypergreen festival of foliage in Adam Rigg’s steeply raked set) where his mother’s ashes circulate in highly visible gusts. There he plans to throw the, uh, mother of all parties for the girls of the area. (For the record, they aren’t all strictly female, girlhood being something you choose and own.)
And these girls, who have been dressed to kill in club-crawling fantasy outfits by Montana Levi Blanco, need some release. They’ve been suffering too long under the yoke of a hunting-driven social order in which they have no power.
That especially includes the high-strung Gaga (Jeanine Serralles, unraveling hilariously), who comes from a family of gun-crazy sheriffs and happens to be the sister of Deon’s dead mother. It is for Gaga’s son, Theo (Will Seefried), that Deon has reserved his most torturous wrath.
The satire involving the town’s men — who also include Gaga’s dad (the invaluable Tom Nelis) and disgraced husband (Haynes Thigpen, who plays an assortment of other roles) — is the play’s least convincing element. Theo is a Second Amendment fanatic and white male supremacist (of shaky masculinity, of course), who streams his wisdom via live videocasts. (David Bengali is the projection designer).
Jacobs-Jenkins has fun having his characters keep going over the same, ever-confusing plot points, in the tradition of choral tragedy. But the repetition becomes wearisome.
The recycling feels freshest when the script lets the title characters explain individually why they need to party in the rural open-air disco they call the club (pronounced “clurb”). The reasons are often familiar — looking for love, for exercise, to induce labor, to escape the information overload of an existence ruled by technology. As a government-employed computer coder and hacker, Ayesha Jordan has a virtuoso soliloquy about the ergonomics of her office chair.
But it’s not only topical grievances that are being aired. Some of these girls have stories about incestuous attachments and murderous parents and witchcraft in politics that bring to mind those doomed heroines of tragedy, Phaedra, Electra and Medea. Yep, they’re still with us, and still miserable.
Oh, and another glamorous dead girl makes a late-evening appearance. That’s Meme (pronounced Mimi, and played with relish by Amelia Workman), Deon’s mom, who makes her entrance mouthing the opening of Adele’s “Hello” (as in “Hello, from the other side”).
By that time, “Girls” has gone way over the top and pretty much stays there, as a wild party should. (I haven’t mentioned the herd of balloon cows, have I?) Yi Zhao’s hallucinatory, audience-drenching lighting creates the visual equivalent of the electronic dance music that numbs even as it energizes. (Palmer Hefferan is the sound designer.)
Kelly’s choreography is artfully and specifically frenetic throughout. It reaches a delirious high point when each of the performers does a solo turn, lip-syncing to Adriano Celentano’s masterwork of unintelligibility “Prisencoliensinainciusol.”
We’ve all lost the plot by then, which is just fine. In fact, when Euripides’ original story reasserts itself for its horrific ending, it doesn’t have much of an impact. As perhaps befits an era in which rational rules appear to have been suspended, catharsis comes not in a pity-and-terror conclusion but in the energy-burning chaos that precedes it.
Girls
Through Oct. 26 at Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; 203-432-1234, yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Ben Brantley is the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times. He has been a staff critic since 1996, filing reviews regularly from London as well as New York. Before joining The Times in 1993, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
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