Bobby Moreno, Bartley Booz, Cricket Brown, Donetta Lavinia Grays, Jeff Biehl, and Bruce McKenzie in The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire. Photo: Carol Rosegg

In a way, The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, a new play by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson, feels like it’s meant to be a bookend (perhaps a prequel?) to Washburn’s renowned 2012 play Mr Burns. If Burns is post-apocalyptic, looking at a world where the electrical grid has catastrophically failed, Burning Cauldron lightly foreshadows that apocalypse, with its characters who’ve chosen to live off the land, forswear twenty-first-century communications technology, and step outside the capitalist rat race. You could imagine, as its characters put together a ragtag message embedded in a play-within-the-play, that some of them would wind up sitting around that campfire telling tales of Simpsons past.

But where Mr. Burns’s worldbuilding feels intentionally elliptical, its overall conceit hangs together in a way that Burning Cauldron can’t match. Here, the opacity just feels like Washburn and Cosson have decided the world of the play is less interesting than its formal qualities–and the result is a cornucopia of experiments across genre and style that add up to an inert whole, albeit performed by an excellent ensemble of off-Broadway stalwarts. Its first act juggles memory play, impressionistic choral poetry, bombastic philosophical debating, and a more or less realist surface narrative with a bit of a suspense element; Act 2 throws in puppets, a stylized fairy-tale play-within-a-play, a dash of possibly nefarious seduction, and an ending twist that seems to contradict everything we thought we understood about the narrative. 

I am, of course, all for bold stylistic experiments, and generally ready to be charmed by puppets, plays-within-plays, twists, and follow-the-breadcrumbs worldbuilding. But there’s no foundation here. There are flashes of compelling imagery and keen performances and evocative individual sentences sprinkled throughout, but the bright spots feel like elegant decoration distracting from an underbaked cake, not enough to make up for an inconsistent tone, a confusing narrative, or a set of characters whose motives are never clear. 

The choral poetry (combined with Ryan Gamblin’s absorbing environmental sound design) paints the scene: a landscape rich with birds and animals; a kitchen full of well-worn utensils and homey cookbooks; collective attunement to the seasons. But as we meet the members of a Northern California “intentional community” teetering on the border of being a cult, the hazy idyll starts to seem both hardscrabble and ideologically bankrupt: Are these people idealists, doomsday preppers, throwback hippie weirdos? Are they in hiding? Are they in thrall to, or afraid of, the group’s de facto leaders, Tom (Bruce McKenzie) and Mari (Marianne Rendon)? (They certainly seem to cave to Tom’s more petulant whims; it’s also true that McKenzie is unparalleled at threading menace into masculinity.) 

If the chorus frames our location, the occasional narration by Milo (Bobby Moreno, playing the character as both a savvy six-year-old in the play’s present and a thirty-something world-weary adult looking at his own childhood with rigorous emotional clarity) seems to place the play’s vantage point as some thirty years later, in a future with hints of post-apocalyptic, one where Harvard, for example (where he went to school) might no longer exist, a time of “deep unsteadiness.” But here, too, a path is sketched out but never fully followed–we don’t learn enough about adult Milo to know why his is the POV that remains. The central event that Milo continues to process is the death of one of the residents, Peter (Tom Pecinka). Peter drifted in about nine months ago and stayed—to the dismay of Milo, who found him an unsatisfactory adult—until, just after the play starts, he dies, seemingly by suicide. Not wanting to get “the authorities” involved—Tom is happy to minimize engagement with the corrupt world—the adults in the group turn their paranoia into virtue, creating a private (and mostly illegal) ritual that includes burning the body and lying about it to anyone who calls looking for Peter. 

Meanwhile, the group’s children, a free-range group of three-to-eight-year-olds played by the same group of actors who play the adults–create a ritual of their own, claiming that Peter has reincarnated as one of their piglets. While there’s a certain delight in watching Bruce McKenzie shift from Tom’s faux-guru persona to play a spritely three-year-old, the scene feels like another stylistic loose end. Outside of this moment, the children remain invisible (as do another dozen+ adults, if I understand the math correctly, neither of which helps with the worldbuilding problem), with Milo being the only child who’s ever seen in the larger group.

Putting off a caller is one thing, but then Peter’s brother, Will (also Pecinka), shows up in person, and seems suspicious of the group’s true intentions–and quickly starts poking holes in Tom’s synthesized spirituality and probing for hints that their purpose is more explicitly revolutionary than it seems. Until Will’s flip phone rings at an inopportune moment, it’s hard to say whether it’s 1968, 2020, or possibly even a near future (Emily Rebholz’s costumes remind us that the hippie vintage aesthetic hasn’t changed all that much over time). But the more we see of Will, the more we realize that his interest in Peter’s death is as pragmatic as the group’s interest in concealing it: Will’s extremely rich grandmother is on her deathbed, and if Peter has predeceased her, Will and another sibling come into even more money–money that he intends to use for revolutionary ends. 

As part of their process of misdirecting Will, the group puts on its play-within-the-play, which they claim is a project Peter was working on with the kids. Shifting gears into a brightly stylized fairy-tale peppiness, the play is charming but the biggest digression of them all: Cosson has staged it with production elements (including puppets by Monkey Boy Productions and special effects by Steve Cuiffo, all of which are cleverly done) that are overly elaborate for the ragtag homemade thing it claims to be, but then the internal play gets suspended before it’s finished.

Before its final twist (mild spoiler alert), Burning Cauldron is frustrating for its ellipses, but holds out the hope that it might yet come together, that the layering on of heightened elements and ominous hints might coalesce into a whole. But after that twist, it’s clear that nothing will coalesce, that in fact all we’ll get is a further jumbling of the multiple levels of theatrical reality in which the play dabbles. I keep trying to come up with possible explanations for the final scene, none of which comports with everything else in the play, nor the future that Will’s ominous hints toward revolution and adult Milo’s narration presage for us. 

And so I’m left fixating on the proliferating loose ends: Where did the group get the money to buy a tract of land in the first place, when they can’t afford to feed their livestock but they seem to have resources, for example, to stock oil paint in their art supplies and put on a fairly elaborate play? (Did Peter fund all of that, perhaps?) What is going on with Ghazal (Bartley Booz, who also doubles as another of the adults), a mentally impaired man who was “abandoned” with them by some strangers who passed through, and who plays the role of holy fool but also seems to be held captive in his room most of the time? (And when things start to seem even more sinister, one wonders, how do strangers like this find the place, anyway, and what really happened to Ghazal’s caretakers?) There are certain hints that Mari is pregnant, yet when she intimates to Will that she had an “affair” with Peter that did not end to Peter’s satisfaction, Will doesn’t seem concerned that this complicates the inheritance picture. Of the rest of the adults, Gracie (Cricket Brown) seems like she’s genuinely seeking something, but what are the others doing there? (One of them, Paul, also played by Booz, seems to exist mostly to underscore the sinister aspects of the group; Milo casually mentions being sexually assaulted by him when he’s eight.) 

Washburn is not a writer one would necessarily call optimistic about the future of humanity; Cosson’s company, The Civilians, often takes an investigative approach to its subjects, using interviews to build plays on human data. But a certain cynicism about humankind writ large is usually balanced by a compassion for, even a faith in, the individual people who appear in their work. Here, the second act eats into whatever I thought I knew about or felt for the characters, and even adult Milo winds up feeling corrupted and sinister. If the apocalypse is coming, these are not the people I want keeping humanity’s torch alive.