Creature

Heidi Schreck—the nervy performer at the center of downtown’s best shows—has turned her hand to writing, and the results have her stamp all over them. In fact, it’s hard not to miss her throughout her medieval-themed comedy Creature, in which Schreck created a role perfect for her steely-angel demeanor. Unfortunately, she has hightailed it uptown (she’s now in Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons), like an irresponsible saint at the rapture.

Trembling at the center of her devoutly peculiar play is Schreck’s version of the real-life 14th-century religious mystic Margery Kempe, a fractious woman troubled by demons and irritating as hell. No one in her podunk English town can stand up to Kempe (Sofia Jean Gomez): not the husband (Darren Goldstein) who loves her nor the priest (Jeremy Shamos) who wants to guide her while struggling with his own orthodoxy. (Demons have a decent shot, particularly the shambling Will Rogers, who makes an adolescent breaking voice sound like the squeak of the damned.) Of course, times are rough for religious outliers (“It’s 1401! They don’t burn women anymore!”), so we follow Kempe through greasy kitchens and anchoress cells, looking for a way to combine beatitude and wifeliness, chastity and motherhood.

Schreck’s script has narrative simplicity, contemporary zing and lyrical flights of startling loveliness. Unfortunately, her hallucinatory, shimmering language desperately needs medieval murk for contrast and mood, and director Leigh Silverman—ignoring the stage’s many candles in favor of big, music-hall light cues—refuses to give it to her. The production, despite championship acting, treads too lightly, and sheds its mysteries along the way. In this sort of vision, it’s sometimes best not to see the light.—Helen Shaw

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