'Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up': One woman's dive into the backwater of memory

Lucy Alibar, writer and star of "Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

By Charles McNulty, Theater Critic

Sept. 12, 2016 10:20 AM PT

Southern writers have a distinct advantage over their Northern counterparts. The South, as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor have depicted it, is so rife with flaming eccentrics that a mere trip to the grocery store can yield a flourishing crop of prize anecdotes.

In her solo performance piece “Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up,” which is receiving its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Lucy Alibar relates vignettes from her childhood living in an exotically chaotic house on a watermelon field in the Florida Panhandle. The daughter of an attorney who defends, pro- bono, murderers who have no one else to stand up for them, she becomes his occasional secretary while still in elementary school.

This is about as unsentimental an education as a fourth-grader can get. Alibar’s approach, however, is delicately wistful. The piece is really a love letter to her iconoclastic, democratically principled dad, written though the eyes of girl endowed with an adult author’s retrospective emotion.

Alibar, who co-wrote the film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (based on her play “Juicy and Delicious”), treats these memories as though they were precious photos in an album she never gets tired of perusing and captioning. Her tales are full of cute weirdos, mean authority figures, adorably unruly children and swampy landscapes dotted with biblical billboards.

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These Christian road signs aren’t incidental to the story. Alibar’s father is an unapologetic atheist who says “Jesus gives him a goddamn heart attack.” A freethinker who calls his wife Boss Lady and his daughter Boss, he has little patience for the backward thinking that can make life in these parts so stifling.

He’s a great character, worthy of being theatrically commemorated, but Alibar hasn’t yet found a sharp enough frame for her material. There’s a lot of business about hearts — damaged hearts, transplanted hearts, the pitter-pat of a girl’s heart under water. But the sociology of the piece is too vague — it’s like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” without the rigorous reflection on race and class. (Alibar’s family seems at once a part of and separate from the poor white milieu, raising questions that remain unanswered.)

There’s a threat of menace in the piece, but it’s not a backlash to the father’s heretical views. It stems from incidents of violence in the community — a reality that Alibar has seen shocking evidence of through her work as kid secretary.

“Burnpile” is rich in personal detail, but it becomes too general as a coming-of-age story. She’s still searching for the artistic perspective that can transform these memories into something objective. Right now, her approach is too gentle, lacking the formal rigor of Faulkner, the harsh outsider commentary of McCullers and the grotesque humor of O’Connor.

The production is staged by Neel Keller, an experienced hand with new writing. (He directed Dael Orlandersmith’s “Forever” and Jennifer Haley’s “The Nether,” among other works at the Douglas.) The set by Takeshi Kata and lighting by Elizabeth Harper create a magical theatrical heap evoking the father’s work, the snake-strewn landscape and the burnpile of the title where the records of men whose cases were lost are set ablaze after their executions

Alibar’s performance style is reminiscent of a songwriter making a demo recording. A lanky blond dressed in jean shorts and an oversized white T-shirt, she comes off as charmingly diffident — not uncomfortable on the stage but too much of a writer to be completely at home.

There is a lot of writing, it must said, for a piece that runs barely 90 minutes but still feels long. Characters are given defining tags (Alibar’s brother, referred to as The Son Of, walks around holding an egg the way Linus carries around a security blanket) and the fey lyricism can get breathless at moments, especially at the end.

I could have done with a bit less of Alibar joyfully discovering her gift for making fake fart sounds. But it was fun to hear about the animals inside and outside her home, the myriad cats, the stinky dog, the horny goat and the poor put-on pig, object of the goat’s lecherous attention.

But it’s Alibar’s father, a rakish idealist, who is the most memorable voice in the piece. I hope she keeps channeling his bright amiable defiance. He deserves a more probing drama, one that asks tougher questions about how his work both reflected and transformed the Southern backwater that spawned yet another literary talent.

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‘Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays; ends Oct. 2 (call for exceptions)

Tickets: $25-$70 (subject to change)

Information: (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org

Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes with no intermission

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