Len Jenkin's Theatre: Wonder and Heart

Early in his career, Len Jenkin identified two qualities that theatre should have: wonder and heart. Imagination creates wonder by transforming nature to suggest more than nature. Love engages the heart on the quest to experience the wonder, for though Jenkin is an experimental playwright, his plays are not abstruse symbols. They are tales that take salesmen and actresses, historical figures and fictional characters, through a Stein landscape and a Kafka story, pop culture, and recreated scenes from the Bible and The Canterbury Tales, The Aeneid, and Headlong Hall to an amusement park ride and a penal colony, a flophouse and a garden. Bodacious verbal and visual images build in power until they soar as pilgrims tell tales to pass the night while waiting to cross the river; Hawthorne, Sophie, and Melville on the beach hear the ever-encroaching kraken; and Margo Veil essays the roles that all questing mortals play in life.