"As an artist, I understand artists and what they do and what they aim for, whether it's out of strategy or desperation. With him, there was no strategy. He had such a challenging life that his art and his writing were really the only ways that he could wind up prevailing. That allowed me to develop a lot of compassion for him."
"The 80-minute show lands us directly in Darger's one-bedroom apartment, its walls tacked with his collages and its corners filled with old newspapers and balls of twine. It's here that the artist spent the most of his life from the 1930s after fleeing a psychiatric facility as a child, creating and stashing away countless drawings and manuscripts that were only discovered after his death in 1973."
Henry Darger, a Chicago janitor who lived in obscurity, created hundreds of drawings and thousands of manuscript pages in isolation that were discovered only after his death in 1973. His work has since inspired biographies, documentaries, and exhibitions. A new 80-minute theatrical production directed by Martha Clarke and scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley brings Darger's story to life on stage. Performance artist John Kelly portrays Darger, delivering a monologue that explores the artist's biography and his elaborate fantasy world featuring a rebel children's army. The production recreates Darger's one-bedroom apartment, filled with collages, newspapers, and personal artifacts, revealing a complex portrait of an outsider artist whose creative output served as his primary means of survival and expression.
Read at Artnet News
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