The Wanton Seed
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To their credit, Shanahan and O’Donnell have the courage of gamblers–they’ve cannibalized Burgess’s text to fit their intuitive understanding of the story’s emotional development and resolution, successfully condensing and transforming the novel into two 30-minute segments separated by an intermission. For minutes at a time the result is nothing short of spellbinding, but they’ve also underestimated the difficulty of deciphering the show’s thematic nuances if the viewer hasn’t read and meditated on Burgess’s novel the way they obviously have. The full impact of their production is dissipated, for example, by the recitation of bizarre, seemingly disjointed textual passages in the show’s first half, passages that are never fully reconciled or explained by the piece’s development in the second half.
Yet the concert is often haunting, beautiful, evocative, terrible–in some ways even more powerful than Burgess’s novel, which seems almost staid by comparison. The heart and soul of The Wanton Seed is its minimalist score, which blends understated, guttural electric-guitar rhythms with a sensuous drum and keyboard. Waxing and waning with eerie vibrancy, the music conjures an emotional landscape of ambiguity, uncertainty, and imminent cataclysmic transformation, a futuristic world that simultaneously recalls the half-remembered distant past. It is an artistic achievement that stands on its own.
But I’m left with the nagging feeling that something has been left unsaid, some larger, more ambitious task ignored by this brash, talented company. After watching both performances and reading Burgess’s novel, I came to feel that the narrative frame provided by Burgess’s excerpted texts may have detracted more than it added to The Wanton Seed–mainly because it diverted attention from the willowy, athletic eruptions of the female quartet, focusing the audience instead on spoken words and dramatic actions whose richness and meaning could be fully appreciated only by those well-acquainted with Burgess’s work. I left both performances eager to see more of Shanahan’s artistic vision, not Burgess’s. Perhaps The Wanton Seed could have been even more spectacular–and meaningful–if Shanahan had relegated the novel to a footnote and trusted her own choreographic judgment to re-create its tone and values.
