Under the Radar Festival: England

“Thanks, art!” declares Tim Crouch in a disarmingly sincere apostrophe halfway through the compelling, quietly provocative England. “You saved our lives!” The audience, at this point, is surrounded by the stuff: Presented under the aegis of the Under the Radar Festival, Crouch’s site-specific piece unfolds in an upstairs gallery at the Chelsea Art Museum. The author and his capable costar, Hannah Ringham, trade parts of a single monologue; initially they seem like docents, guiding the audience in a standing group, but the story they tell is a deeply personal one of failing health and dubious rescue. And the narrator’s declaration about salvation by art turns out to be both rhetorically inflated and literally true.

As in his previous New York ventures, My Arm and An Oak Tree, Crouch fashions a style that is both expressly theatrical and eerily intimate. Although England recalls the work of Wallace Shawn (The Fever in its themes of Western luxury and Third World suffering, The Designated Mourner in its spatial organization), Crouch’s points are gentler and harder to pin down. Given the English narrator’s dependence on an American art-dealer boyfriend for money and security—and the plot’s eventual resolution in an exploited Islamic locale—it is tempting to read England as allegorical. But there is no erasing the specific humanity of Crouch and Ringham’s searching, plangent silences. This is a play that is not afraid to stop and make you think.