All Hands

We are ushered into All Hands through a narrow passage that ends in a burgundy room with a vivid, patterned floor. Banks of seats look down on the narrow playing space, and weird, golden geometric shapes shine down from the walls. Alec Duffy’s chorus-ensemble Hoi Polloi has assembled again, milling around, murmuring and giving one another a variety of cryptic signals. We’ve become privy to a meeting of some unnamed secret society—one part corporate retreat, one part Masonic mystery. Meta-mantras (“This is all fake, this is just theater”) and weird orphic rituals vie with the group’s deliberate ordinariness—after every elaborate chant routine (composed by Malloy and choreographed by Dan Safer), the proceedings lapse back into church-basement banality.

So why are we here at the Lodge, on this night of all nights? Is this the moment that the ceremonies will finally achieve some terrible efficacy? Or will the cult vibe dissipate, All Hands’ bourgeois acolytes diverted by chat and potluck? For the most part, the pattern is subsidence and diversion. Action does bubble up from time to time—as when the group offers shelter to a stranger (a terrific, terrified Saori Tsukada), or when an agitated novice bursts in, having seen “worms in the mirror.” But as seems appropriate for a drama built out of a chorus (or vice versa), All Hands tends to absorb solo energies back into itself. That makes for a long-seeming evening, since we soon realize that nothing can disturb the absurd mysteries, so solemnly undertaken. As with many services—even one as exquisitely rendered as this—masses drag, and communion can be lost on the nonbelievers.—Helen Shaw