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The title does, indeed, tell the tale. James Ortiz's play investigates the rusty history of one Nick Chopper, an ordinary Munchkin man who first fell in love with an axe and then a girl, who because of her servitude to the Wicked Witch of the East unwittingly led him down the Steampunk path that resulted in his flesh and bones being replaced with metal. If you're familiar with Nick's background, as revealed in Baum's 1918 novel The Tin Woodman of Oz, none of this will be a surprise to you. But if Ortiz takes great pains to make his adaptation factually faithful, the approach he's taken (with his codirector, Claire Karpen) to present it is anything but. It unfolds live through a scintillating combination of dance, pantomime, and bunraku puppetry that makes high feelings and sweeping magic seem like simple, everyday occurrences. The Witch soars through the audience on a stick and transforms into a withered woman who terrifies her servant Nimmee and her beloved. Crows cut through the air themselves with menacingly flapping wings. Trees close in on unsuspecting forest explorers. A part-bear, part-tiger Kalidah stalks and savages the stage. And, with the help of a trio of enterprising tinkers, Nick becomes the Tin Woodman we know right before our eyes. (And, oh yes, there's also something about a little girl and a house.)
Against this backdrop, there's plenty of room for powerful emotions to emerge: You can't help but be enraptured by Nick's parents love for him, for example, or his subsequent devotion to Nimmee or the abuse she suffers at the Witch's decrepit hands. The scenes in which Nick is systematically dismembered by his own enchanted axe are genuinely harrowing. And the performances, primarily Ortiz as a brooding Nick, Amanda A. Lederer as the Witch, and especially Eliza Simpsons as a Nimmee of shimmering innocence and likability, are just right. Things are on shakier ground when this visual feast of a show tries to give itself voice. There's almost no dialogue, which makes what little there is (primarily a speech for Nick at the outset) stick out as unnecessarily presumptive poetry. And though Edward W. Hardy's music (which he plays himself on the violin) is appropriately moody, like mist settling just below the treetops, Jennifer Loring's lyrics likewise can't surpass the endlessly imaginative creations that power the lion's share of the story. So thoughtful and beautiful is the overall experience that those actual words become superfluous; the people, the puppets, and the passion behind them tell us everything we need to know, and cut much deeper than simply the ear. For a play about a man who loses his heart (twice, in fact), The Woodsman certainly has a big enough one of its own.
The Woodsman
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