This review was originally published on March 7, 2024, when Illinoise opened at the Park Avenue Armory. At the 77th Tony Awards, Justin Peck won the award for best choreography.
The last time I listened to Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 indie opus Illinois straight through, I was biking across the southern tip of that state, crossing the flat, snaking Mississippi floodplain, thinking about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The day before—the day when she died—my partner and I had ridden 108 miles, the first century in our quest to cycle across America. “Oh, God of Progress,†Sufjan sang in my earbuds as I pedaled past vast swaths of soybeans, “have you degraded or forgot us? Where have your laws gone? I think about it now.â€
I’ve got “Chicago,†the central anthemic banger from Illinois, constantly on shuffle, but it takes a conscious emotional commitment to experience the album from beginning to end. Stevens’s music is sweeping and many-splendored, as rich in its orchestrations as it is raw in its emotion. It’s not Kurt Cobain or Jeff Mangum raw, but something different — Stevens isn’t tearing open his chest and dumping the entrails out. He’s gently unpicking the stitching above his sternum, opening the rib cage as with a jeweled key, and letting out a swarm of butterflies. If you’re going to drop the needle on “Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois†and keep listening all the way through the rolling, repeating little bells at the end of “Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run,†you’ve got to be ready to, as the album cover says, “Come on feel the Illinoise.†And this is the real triumph of the new show built by Stevens, director and choreographer Justin Peck, and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury around the epic blueprint of the album: Beyond its many technical glories, and its few brief stumbles, Illinoise achieves a holistic transcendence. For 90 glorious minutes, you do feel. Irony and cynicism slink away with their tails between their legs. The show’s extraordinary corps of dancers, musicians, and singers throws open a window to the cosmos, and we all turn like hungry wintering plants toward the sun.
The moment I realized there would be no spoken dialogue in Illinoise was the moment I knew Peck and Drury were taking us somewhere wonderful. While it’s natural enough for a choreographer with Peck’s training and pedigree to anchor a piece in movement (he’s a Tony winner, he choreographed Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and he danced with the New York City Ballet, where he’s now resident choreographer), it takes a special confidence for a playwright, even one with a Pulitzer, to say: You know what? No need for words. This is tanztheater, and though it hews closer to navigable plot than some of the masterworks of the tradition (Pina Bausch’s, for instance), it’s still functioning from a place of ecstatic faith in the body. That and the music will tell us everything we need to know.
Drury and Peck are credited with “Story†for Illinoise, and they’ve accounted for both the picaresque qualities of Stevens’s album and for its emotional coherency by crafting a narrative about narratives. On a beautifully wide-open set by Adam Rigg—with upside-down pine trees hanging playfully overhead, and a surround of steelwork scaffolding that brings to mind these guys having lunch—a cast carrying backpacks and notebooks comes together somewhere in a field to tell stories around a campfire. This story-club format allows for songs that exist with more insularity on Stevens’s musical tour of the Prairie State: Alejandro Vargas dances an eerie duet with a clown during “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,†a delicate, disturbing lament that ponders the human capacity for monstrousness; Jeanette Delgado fends off an army of American patriarchs, characterized as the lurching undead, in “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!†(“They tremble with the nervous thought / Of having been, at last, forgot,†go the lyrics.) And Rachel Lockhart and Byron Tittle perform a stunning duet to “Jacksonville,†as Lockhart’s character—moving with the soft ease and specificity of ballet, and with the nerve and rhythm of street dance—encounters a tap-dancing ancestor. Tittle’s dancing is magnificent: This isn’t tap as quaint Broadway diversion. It’s tap as athletic, virtuosic heritage, both physical and spiritual.
We know, however, as we go on these individual journeys, that a central storyline awaits us. A character called Henry (Ricky Ubeda, who channels grief with real grace), is hovering around the edges of the story circle. His comrades keep encouraging him to share, but he can’t quite bring himself to step forward. It’s clear he’s carrying something heavy and fragile, and that his story will take us through the rising waves of Stevens’s suite of songs, across its climax and toward its conclusion.
For those who crave a little more clarity (and love a souvenir), the program for Illinoise has been tucked inside an illustrated version of Henry’s journal, its text written by Drury and its hand-lettering and doodles created by Joanna Neborsky. It’s a lovely object, but the explicit links that it makes between Henry’s tale and the lyrics of Stevens’s songs aren’t really necessary: We can see and hear it all on the stage. The story Henry will eventually tell us has to do with the loss of a friend, Carl (beautifully danced by the lithe, fairy-prince-like Ben Cook). It’s also a coming-out story and a leaving-home story. “I drove to New York / In a van, with my friend,†ring out the lyrics to the pulsing, yearning “Chicago.†“We slept in parking lots / I don’t mind, I don’t mind / I was in love with the place / In my mind, in my mind / I made a lot of mistakes / In my mind, in my mind.â€
The story of how Henry loses Carl is also the story of how he finds Douglas (Ahmad Simmons, gentle and radiant), his first real adult lover and the calm affirmation to the anxious, fluttering soul bottled up inside his Midwestern body. The duets between Ubeda and Cook, Ubeda and Simmons, and between Cook and Gaby Diaz—playing the girl Carl loves, even as his friend Henry quietly pines for him—are exquisite exchanges of energy, from the playful to the tragic. During “Casimir Pulaski Day,†so devastating in its soft, banjo-driven prettiness, Cook and Diaz repeat a motion in which they reach up together, then Diaz slips through Cook’s arms, crashing to the floor. Over and over again we watch him fail to hold onto her; we see her becoming less and less solid. There’s something heartbreaking in witnessing dancers at the peak of their form—their bodies such gorgeous machines, so entirely powerful and controlled—channeling physical breakdown, weakness, illness, and death. “All the glory that the Lord has made†inevitably comes to this: “And he takes, and he takes, and he takes.â€
Last October, Sufjan Stevens dedicated his new album, Javelin, to his partner, Evans Richardson, who died in April. Mourning his lover was also the first time the singer spoke publicly about his sexuality. Even if Ubeda and Simmons didn’t bear an echoing resemblance to Stevens and Richardson—and they do—it would be impossible not to feel the weight of that loss running through Illinoise. The show’s three singers further channel Stevens by wearing colorful, moth-like wings, a costume piece he’s been known to wear in concert, in variously heightened forms. (Stevens himself isn’t onstage in Illinoise; he’s just everywhere inside it.) Those singers—Elijah Lyons, Tasha Viets-VanLear, and Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond—are as transporting as the show’s dancers. On the set’s steel-beamed scaffolding, they stand above the action like counterculture guardian angels, Nova’s brilliant neon orange mane flashing in the lights, their trio of distinctive voices braiding and unbraiding through Stevens’s wry, ruminative lyrics. Much has been made of Stevens’s religiosity—is he Christian? Are his songs? And so on—but Illinoise makes clear what the music itself always has: Whatever Stevens’s personal background, whatever the spiritual vocabulary of his writing, his art reaches for a sense of worship and possibility that eschews labels, limits, and exclusions.
Trumpets and woodwinds in my ears, the flat, hot asphalt of an Illinois backroad under my tires, miles and miles of sky, the 2020 election 45 days away. “All things go … All things grow,†sang Sufjan. Now, in another world, in the same old world, Illinoise sings on. May it leave behind seeds for more theater that dances, literally or figuratively, with such joyful abandon.
Illinoise is at the St. James Theatre.