Bubonic Homunculus
WNEP Theater
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Most of the “useful findings” come from The Bubonic Homunculus, part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. Writer-director John Hannon has a smart, wry touch with genre boilerplate and metatextual references, and his cast is equally sharp, talented, and versatile. Everyone seems well versed in the specific tropes–Universal and Hammer horror films, goth-rock androgyny, and buckets and buckets of Poe–that Hannon dusts off, which goes a long way toward justifying the sometimes showily knowledgeable script. Its second half is undeniably disappointing, but until then it’s great fun.
He describes all this by talking as though to himself, in elliptically lyrical, irregularly rhyming passages. Like many postapocalyptic fictions, The Bubonic Homunculus plays up the schizophrenic aspect of its protagonist’s speeches, but in uniquely bold, grisly fashion. Surrounded by his victims, Node reenacts his deadly mutation and their deaths using the corpses as puppets, a form of zombie slapstick that handily illustrates his obsessive drive and desolate subjectivity. Once summoned up for a scene, his former colleagues and acquaintances walk and talk by themselves–but the moment focus shifts or a scene ends they collapse in a heap. Node’s vexed shuttling between characters who expire whenever he turns his back is a masterpiece of black Keaton-esque humor.
Bakis’s novel documents the rise and fall of a race of superintelligent, humanlike dogs, focusing on its three great leaders: sociopathic 19th-century bioengineer Augustus Rank, who first undertakes to breed the dogs; monster dog Mops Hacker, who leads them in revolt 100 years later; and monster dog Klaue Lutz, who shepherds their relocation to 21st-century New York City. Ellison and Wilson clearly had no choice but to condense Bakis’s saga and pare its overlapping narratives down to the stories of its two most compelling characters, Hacker and Rank, told simultaneously. Director Seth Fisher can’t be blamed for opting out of special-
But since nothing much works in the first act, the hasty if voluminous tying up of ends in the second is completely alienating, not a source of dismay–a reflection of the novel’s stubbornly literary quality and peculiar flaws. In a work like The Bubonic Homunculus, the flames that consume the villain’s lair as the credits roll seem a plausible tragic accident. But here even the blueprint points to arson.
