Charles Bukowski in Carroll Gardens: Red-Headed, Red-Hot

Who said poetry was dead?

In Company XIV’s latest show Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore., poetry is not only alive, but red-headed, high-heeled and barely dressed.

The dance-theatre meditation based on female characters in poetry by famed American writer Charles Bukowski opened Sunday at the 303 Bond Theatre and runs through May 8.

Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. was five years in the making for choreographer and director Austin McCormick, who conceived of the show as a senior at the Juilliard School. He had directed a 15-minute performance that examined four female characters from Bukowski’s work, but he knew Bukowski had much more to tell, so he turned that short show into a full evening of theatre. 

McCormick says he’s drawn to Bukowski’s work because of its “unique mix of poetic imagery and real-life situations.”

Acting out those situations as an assortment of female characters is a red-headed Laura Careless. A bearded and disheveled Jeff Takacs narrates the show in the role of the poet.

The lighting of a cigarette in the pitch-black warehouse-like theatre starts the show, and it only gets hotter from there. A rectangle made of tube lights on the floor seems to indicate a stage, but the audience soon learns that the performance space has no boundaries. Takacs and Careless, clad in lingerie, chase one another from the theatre’s back wall to the audience’s front row and back again, moving to the rhythm of Bukowski’s prose, and interspersed with snippets of classical and jazz tunes.

“Bukowski was detached from the women in his poems, but at the same time he tried to understand them,” says Careless. Soon after the show begins, the audience feels the same way.

Spotlights, film projections, smoke, mirrors, water, rubber dirt and a dozen pairs of high-heeled shoes play supporting roles and turn what could have been a simple two-person show into a visual spectacle, bringing to life Bukowski’s dark themes of voyerism, sexuality and objectification.

Careless’s sometimes jerky but always graceful movements punctuate Takacs's reciting of Bukowski’s poetry. Her interpretive dance is as unpredictable as it is intoxicating as she stomps, slides and crawls from the concrete floor to a steel chair to a legless piano in towering stilettos with multiple, unobscured costume changes in between.

McCormick, founder of Company XIV, says Bukowski’s work has a performance element already built in, but that doesn’t mean writing the show was easy. McCormick sifted through hundreds of the author's poems to piece together the narrative that carries the hour-long performance. He and the cast and crew hope Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. serves as a conversation piece for the audience. 

“Bukowski’s work is very dark, but it’s an everyday type of dark,” says Takacs. “The audience might recall the show when they run across everyday misery.”

McCormick chimes in: “But what Bukowski articulates so well is that in those moments, you can find beauty.”

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Performances of "Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore." are Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 8 p.m., through May 8. Tickets are $30 for adults and $25 for students and seniors. The show contains partial nudity - no one under 16 will be admitted.