Heather Christian is both everywhere and nowhere to be found in this revival of her “Animal Wisdom,” which she first performed nine years ago, and which she still struggles to define. Her tortured 500-word “composer’s note”  is distributed to the audience as we enter a theater elaborately redesigned to suggest Christian’s childhood in Natchez, Mississippi. 

 The show is not a musical, she writes; it is a  “requiem within a requiem.” It is not traditional, it is a conjuring of ghosts, and “my life story, as clearly as I can tell it (which is not very clearly at all)”  — although now it’s a life story portrayed not by Heather Christian as herself, but by Kenita R. Miller as “H.”

I have little doubt that Christian has structured this “ritual,” this “mass”– which she also calls “a lecture demonstration of channeling through music” and a “largely unvoiced internal struggle of this person (who was me)” – with erudition and craft.    And Miller, Tony-nominated for “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” has a charming presence and a golden voice. But it took until the last fifteen minutes of this two-hour opus  – when a 34-member community choir added their voices in total darkness – for me to see the light.

“H” tells some down-home stories about her childhood in Natchez, which in its rendition at the Signature Theater Center resembles an old junk shop filled with bric-a-brac, old lamps,  a Coke machine, bronze baby shoes, and (apparently) an outdoors strewn with overgrown, artificial-looking vegetation.  She spends much of her time talking about ghosts, several of them her relatives, one an apparently hallucinated childhood girlfriend, another something of a roommate, “Having a ghost in your home is sort of par for the course in Natchez, Mississippi,” she explains.  To her, ghosts offer profound connections.  “I don’t think you can talk about ghosts without talking about God. I don’t think you can talk about God without talking human nature and evolution. And you cannot talk about ANY of those things without talking about music.”

But I don’t think you can talk about ghosts and H’s “strong connection to my dead,” without talking about the reality of death. And what I missed here is a palpable sense of mourning. There is a reference to grief in Christian’s 500-word manifesto, but little direct evidence of it on stage.  H conducts rituals, one involving distributing cups of Coke, which seem a sincere effort at capturing a secular kind of spirituality. But a requiem by any normal definition is a musical composition honoring the dead and intended to provide solace to the living, and I derived little solace from any of these clever constructions.

Christian is a talented, tuneful and eclectic songwriter, which she demonstrates here, with the aid of Miller’s performance and the half-dozen game musicians decked out in Brenda Abbanandolo’s playful costumes, as they double as Christian’s family members and ghosts– and most effectively in that final collective concert in darkness.  There are signs of the same beauty in this score, as in her later work, the more terse Terce, the more linear I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,  and the more forceful “Oratorio for Living Things,” which wowed me in 2022, and was revived at the start of Signature Theater’s current season, Its thirty-fifth.  It’s hard to blame Signature for wanting to end the season with more work from this same unique questing artist.

Animal Wisdom
Signature Theater through June 14
Running time: About two hours, with no intermission
Tickets: $49 – $207
Written by Heather Christian
Directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant
Featuring Kenita R. Miller 
Scenic design by Emmie Finckel, costume design by Brenda Abbanandolo, lighting design by Masha Tsimring, sound design by Nick Kourtides
El Beh (Cello), Alexandra Crosby (Music Director/Piano), Francesca Dawis (Violin), Caro Moore (Percussion), Kris Saint-Louis (Bass), and Zack Zaromatidis (Guitar).

plus 34 “community choir members”