Review: The Life of Prolific Outsider Artist Henry Darger Gets Slender Treatment in Bughouse

Henry Darger is one of the best-known creators of what is often called “outsider art.” A janitor by trade, he composed a 15,000-page epic fantasy about children who go to war with adults, and painted hundreds of watercolors, many of which depicted violent scenes from his novel. His works might have been trashed if not for the scrupulous landlords who discovered them and brought them to the attention of the art and publishing worlds. Largely ignored while alive, Darger became something of a sensation after he died in 1973.

His life was troubled and isolated, as we learn in Bughouse, directed by Martha Clarke and adapted by Crimes of the Heart playwright Beth Henley from Darger’s own writings. In addition to his gargantuan novel, he left behind a 5,000-page autobiography, a work long enough, one would think, to provide ample details for a play that delves into the psyche of this enigmatic creative.

Yet Henley’s play tells us little more about Darger than we would learn from skimming a Wikipedia article. It may be unfair to expect anything more from a solo show that clocks in at only 60 minutes, and if you know nothing about Darger, you will come away with some idea of his curious life and eccentric body of work. But it probably won’t make you want to know more.

We meet Darger (John Kelly) in his cramped Chicago apartment, jam-packed with books, National Geographics, and religious paraphernalia. A rosary casually hangs around a lampshade, and several Virgin Mary statues sit on the mantel of a file-stuffed fireplace, before which he kneels. “Why have you not answered my prayers?” he cries like Lear as a thunderstorm rages outside (effective sound design by Arthur Solari). The Virgins stare down at him silently; they’ve heard this one before.

He is neatly dressed in a light-blue shirt and suspendered pants (Donna Zakowska unassuming costume design hardly makes him look like a haunted man). In this hoarder’s paradise, Darger, who (falsely) claims to be Brazilian, clacks at his typewriter as visions of warrior children, the Vivian Girls, peek through windows and appear on the walls (John Narun projects Ruth Lingford’s remarkable animations, with brilliant cinematography by Fred Murphy, into every nook and cranny of the cluttered room). We learn about the stepmother who left the likely neurodiverse 12-year-old at a disreputable asylum for “feeble-minded children” where he was abused, and about his eventual escape to a hospital run by nuns who hired him as a janitor, a subsistence job that allowed him to fill his solitude with fantasy.

With faint echoes of Krapp’s Last Tape, Henley’s Bughouse combines bullet points from Darger’s life and recitations of scenes from the novel, together creating a miniature portrait of a man whose troubled childhood manifested itself into adult life. It’s all a bit artificially constructed, with Kelly narrating directly to the audience when he’s not pecking at the typewriter; but Kelly makes the monologuing seem as though it could be the random, overly loud ramblings of a man who spends too much time alone (Darger had only one known friend). An occasional bang on the door by an angry neighbor, followed by a brusque request to shut the hell up, reinforces this idea.

But if Henley and Clarke’s intention is to make Darger into a compelling character, they’ve fallen short. Despite Kelly’s best efforts, Darger never seems like more than a quirky, if extremely creative, eccentric whose work was fortuitously discovered by landlords with a nose for the arts. The play makes us wonder how many less lucky “outsider artists” have had their works relegated to recycling bins.

The production’s creative elements, however, are remarkable. Neil Patel’s set design is something to behold, with an extraordinarily detailed apartment room that convincingly conveys Darger’s cramped quarters and lifelong obsessions: Christian iconography, sketches of children tacked to the walls, a carton of Morton salt prominently featuring a little girl with an umbrella (Faye Armon-Tronsoco is responsible for the cornucopia of props). Narun’s haunting projections, including the ghostly apparition of a murdered girl whom Darger turned into the heroine of his epic, effectively create a nightmarish interior world that fits with the temperament of a man whose only escape from the harsh world was his imagination.

Did the play convince me of Darger’s “genius”? I confess to knowing little about him previously, but I went away from Bughouse wondering whether his fame came more from the discovery of a massive corpus of creative work by an unlikely artist than from the quality of work itself. Suffice it to say, I will not be seeking out his novel anytime soon.