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January 2005 Enactment The Mummery Book impressed me as a strikingly singular creation—a coming-of-age journey unlike any other I know of, concocted by a very unusual, powerful, quirky and fearless mind. This is all I can say of the author from the evidence of the play, and yet I feel justified in concluding this much based on my assumption that the play is a stylized version of a very real lifelong personal journey, with the intent of enabling the internal experience to burst out on the stage. As literature, The Mummery Book belongs among a small pantheon of Western ecstatic, visionary and exploratory works, from The Odyssey and The Pilgrim's Progress through A Voyage to Arcturus and Angels in America. The ability to bring an alien, surreal mental and emotional landscape out into the open and make it both compelling and accessible is a rare achievement. Perhaps Dostoevsky came closest. One other comparison—where Angels in America bogs down and more or less whimpers off the stage, shackled by its author's pique with God, The Mummery Book soars ecstatically beyond what appears to be a dreary and agonizing end-of-life deterioration. Perhaps this is so because almost all Western literary works aim their defining moments either at achieving the ultimate statement of individuality or illustrating the dissolution of the individual identity into an existential soup. Enter The Mummery Book, which almost effortlessly combines a uniquely individual vision with an exultant immersion into the Divine Infinite, matched in my experience only by certain passages in The Bible. That's really something! As a practicing (radically minded) Christian, I come to view the enactment of The Mummery Book with certain lenses in place. As I believe that Jesus transcended his time on earth, and that no one's intellectual construct of God comes anywhere close to Truth, I also take on faith (where evidence is lacking) that we individuals carry filaments of truth that link us to the aforementioned Divine Infinite. We are separate and unique, and yet not so. Parts of us die so that other parts might live more fully. Frankly, The Mummery Book blew me away. It gave me a new experience, which is why people travel or read or smoke or join churches or skydive or do any number of things, so often to come back to themselves unsatisfied. To me, not knowing precisely what to expect, I found that The Mummery Book altered my internal world in a satisfying and expansive way. It was also so mesmerizing and vividly rampant as to be disconcerting and difficult to sit through. I don't know what the author or the community that produced it intends, but I can see it produced (perhaps in a somewhat condensed form) much more widely than it has been. In short, thanks for the opportunity to experience this. —LOREN JENKS |
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