Review: ’Boney Manilli’ at the Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center doesn’t get enough credit for its commitment to silliness.

For example, the center is currently in the middle of its annual Out There series of experimental theater pieces. This series sometimes demonstrates an opposing tendency, a seriousness and stateliness that is the opposite of silly. The first show in the series was an adaptation of artist Sophie Calle’s “Exquisite Pain,” a collection of absolutely agonized monologues presented in a format that was so austere and nontheatrical that the show experienced multiple audience walkouts. Experimental theater sometimes makes big asks; for some audiences, the asks will be too big.

But the current show, “Boney Manilli” (playing through Saturday) is introduced by a magnificently goofy pre-show event: A puppet karaoke, led by a guttural, flamboyantly charismatic crow that cajoles passers-by into singing uptempo pop. Two amateur singers, who looked to be Walker staffers, enthusiastically warbled their way through ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” as I entered the theater. I preferred it to the ABBA musical of the same name.

It’s a good tone-setter for the play, “Boney Manilli” by artist and playwright Edgar Arceneaux, coming after a long residence at the Walker, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Dreamsong.

Arceneaux’s play likewise is rooted in pop nostalgia, and likewise has puppets.

On its surface, “Boney Manilli” is a delightfully inexplicable collision of elements. It tells of an artist/playwright’s attempts to create a stage play that can redeem the reputation of Milli Vanilli, the 1990s Munich-based pop duo whose careers imploded after they were discovered to be lip-syncing.

Also in “Boney Manilli,” the playwright’s brother is attempting his own theatrical redemption, adapting Disney’s notorious “Song of the South” (a movie The Guardian describes as being riddled with “insidious racism”) into a work of revisionist theater. And, at the same time, their mother is in the late stages of dementia, and the play offers an onstage countdown to the moment when she will die.

It’s messy, but purposefully so, reflecting characters in a moment of startling (and often startlingly hilarious) chaos.

The onstage playwright doesn’t have, let’s say, full control of his subject. His work is haunted by a puppet of band member Fab Morvan, whose presence the playwright can’t completely explain, and with whom he sometimes fights. The brother is adamant that Disney stole the Uncle Remus stories that form “Song of the South” from their grandfather. And the mother is simply, and heartbreakingly, declining.

But Arceneaux somehow finds connective themes between these three stories, mostly in questions of voice: Milli Vanilli was forced to sing using someone else’s voice, “Song of the South” spoke with a voice stolen from Black culture. And, as the disease progresses, the mother is losing her voice.

I spoke with Arceneaux after the show, and he discussed his own mother’s dementia and death. He described it less as an experience of derangement than a sort of alternate cognition, a strangely beautiful transition that brought with it an unexpected, alternate wisdom.

“Boney Manilli” reproduces this in a way. It starts with chaos, but, as the mother’s dementia worsens, as she can speak less and less, the play’s elements strip themselves down, simplifying and approaching each other, until they are one story — a story of a family united in silence, sharing a contradictory moment of tragedy and joy at the end of one of their stories.

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