'Lord of the Flies' Theater Review

If you went to high school, you probably read William Golding’s classic
"Lord of the Flies" about a group of British school children who crash land on a deserted island and struggle to avoid anarchy when faced with no adult supervision. The novel is so abundantly literary, chock full of enough metaphors and symbols and motifs to keep an honors English class busy for weeks.

It’s hard not to be apprehensive about a stage adaptation of "Lord of the Flies" because no one wants to see an erudite, two-hour show about the many symbolic facets of a conch shell. Luckily, that’s not what Henley Street Theatre has produced. Instead, director Josh Chenard has taken Goulding’s book and turned it into a gut-punch of a play - loud, visceral, concise and brutal.

Chenard’s direction creates something that Golding’s book never quite could convey – the sense of just how much the characters are a gang of loud, dirty, frenetic boys who interrupt and talk over each other and move with the kinetic energy of ping pong balls. The characters of Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon are iconic enough to be archetypes as well as symbols for various themes and ideas. But this production turns them instantly into flesh and blood kids.

Chenard wisely also keeps his considerably-sized cast of young men almost continuously on stage, creating the necessary tension and claustrophobia needed to propel the action from the arguments of children in the first act to the bloody violence and power struggles of the second. Jason Winebarger’s set also helps to ratchet up the tension. Even though the action takes place on an island, there’s nothing idyllic about the set. Instead it’s a fever-dream tree house, all strange angles, sharp corners and slanted floors.

Joe Doran’s lighting design is exceptional, particularly in the moments where the action freezes and the characters are silhouetted against the background, burning imprints that stay with you. Nicole Slaven’s costumes are great, taking the boys from neatly dressed school children in uniforms to animalistic figures covered in mud and the tattered shards of their former identities.

Everything works here with utter precision. But the life-blood of the show is in its young and often revelatory cast; mostly comprised of high school- and college-aged actors. They throw themselves at the material with the energy of, well, teenage boys. As the initial "elected" leader Ralph, who struggles so valiantly between decency and baser instincts, Eric Evans delivers an incredibly brave and raw performance. You can see the cracks appear in his physicality and by the end of the play, his portrayal of the disintegrated Ralph is devastating.

Sean Wyland is exceptional as the kind, doomed outcast Simon. He nails the vulnerability of the character, but more importantly he makes Simon good without turning him into a bland martyr. Drew Sease is another stand-out as Jack, the preteen sociopath who struggles with Ralph for control of the island. There’s always a lot of action on stage at any given moment in this play, but it’s hard to look away from Sease. In the book his character is the one often read as a capital, S, symbol for evil and mankind’s baser instincts. But Sease, like the rest of the cast, takes his role away from literary tropes and into a completely three-dimensional realm where things are far more nuanced and complex.

The rest of the cast is equally deserving of praise because even though most of them are years older than the roles they play, you never question that these are children. They do such a remarkable job of projecting a constant state of fear and waiting desperately for an adult to show up before things get any worse. You watch this play on the edge of your seat, since there’s never a moment without that unease. You know that tragedy looms, but like with a horror film, you can’t look away.

However, Chenard’s staging never feels exploitive or cruel, the way a horror movie does. Maybe it’s because the technical crew does such a good job of mixing moments of beauty in with the tension. Maybe it’s because the actors are so great at alternating between innocence and cruelty that you root for them, even knowing their fates. For all of these reasons and more Henley Street’s "Lord of the Flies" succeeds.

It’s taken the ultimate school reading book and stripped it of the somber weight of its symbols and big ideas and turned it into a pulsating, gripping action story that, 50 years later, grabs you by the throat, gets under your skin and asks you the same question it asks of its characters: In a world gone mad, could you be decent? More importantly, would you have the courage to try?