A Blaze Hungry for Dreams ‘Solitary Light,’ by Axis Theater, on Triangle Factory Fire
Claudia La RoccoSeptember 16, 2014: You might think an hourlong musical is an inadequate vehicle for capturing the Triangle garment factory fire of 1911, a horrifying and shameful episode in American history involving the deaths of 146 garment workers, most of them female immigrants. And you might be right. But Randy Sharp’s Solitary Light, playing at Axis Theater as part of the Theater: Village festival, offers inadequate evidence either way: though ostensibly focused on the devastating conflagration that helped galvanize the labor movement, this production is, in actuality, only vaguely moored to that event. And that’s fine, I suppose. Truth in advertising only gets you so far in the arts. But what exactly is Solitary Light about? A difficult question to answer, but here are some elements: lots of singing about light and love and flying away, and lots of bodies roving about a relentlessly underlit stage, muttering intensely to themselves like the people you avoid in the subway. Talk of fireflies, beautiful girls and the romance of the big city at night.
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