Mushroom mysticism emerges at Target Margin

The Mushroom, a performance piece billed as “a pageant that gives a micro-view of the forest floor,” is playing at Sunset Park’s Target Margin Theater Jan. 8-11. Part of the Exponential Festival, presenting experimental works at venues around the city throughout the month, the show is co-directed by writer and production designer Normandy Sherwood and choreographer and puppeteer Nikki Calonge.

With The Mushroom, the longtime collaborators have created a theater and movement spectacle about awakening one’s spirit through connection with nature. Both serious and funny, it begins with a woman talking about a mystical experience, but rather than following her on her journey, it goes deep into the world of the experience itself, the world of mushrooms.

Sherwood said the inspiration for The Mushroom came to her more than a decade ago at a silent writing retreat in a Zen Buddhist community in California. Affected by being in a meditative state and surrounded by nature, she found herself having a “serious philosophical and existential relationship with a mushroom, sinking down into the micro level.” She wrote a short piece about the experience at the time, but it wasn’t until she was developing a different play with Calonge years later that she began to imagine the movement component that would eventually bring the mushroom project to life.

The show is divided into three parts, each distinct in style and point of view, and each taking place in a different space in the Target Margin building. The Sunset Post visited Sherwood, Calonge and several of their collaborators last month during a rehearsal of the forest floor sequence in the studio where it will be staged.

The studio felt like a kids’ playroom, with a low-lying fort made of foam surrounded by patches of shag carpet and a scattering of colorful fabrics. The dancers wore intriguing mushroom costumes, some a makeshift layering of clothes and accessories, others more like wearable puppets. An umbrella, mesh laundry baskets, and hoop skirt-like constructions with feather dusters sprouting out the top became their mushroom caps, while layers of fringes and ruffles suggested other fungal structures.

Calonge is experienced with work that blurs the line between costume and puppet. At the rehearsal, she led the mushrooms through a couple of scenes, working out the kinks as they squirmed in and out of the fort, and teaching them dance steps, all amid periodic outbursts of laughter. The idiosyncratic effects of their movements inside their costumes made them feel like alien beings, sentient but unfamiliar.

It may seem like a long way from the show’s contemplative beginnings to this fanciful vision, but Sherwood said the humor was “inevitable.” Referring to the play’s sole human character, Calonge added, “She is communing intensely with nature in her mystical experience, and the world is cracking jokes, saying, ‘Look at me!’”

As more design elements are layered into the production, including light, sound, and set design, the team is creating an immersive experience to draw the audience into a kind of hypnotic sensory communion with the show itself.

Known for making mesmerizing theatrical worlds, Sherwood won a Concept and Production Design Obie Award for her show Psychic Self Defense. For The Mushroom, the studio space will be transformed from floor to ceiling. “We’ll be filling it with organic soft shapes, almost like it’s inside some sort of plant or mushroom,” Sherwood said. “It will be like entering into a mysterious environment, getting comfortable, and then the environment starts animating.” The sets, props, costumes, and puppets will all be animatable, giving a feeling of the world coming alive.

Many of the ideas guiding the details of the production have a basis in the biological traits and processes of mushrooms and other life forms. Along with their team of designers and performers, Sherwood and Calonge are exploring ideas about survival, reproduction, composting, predation, and more, but putting them together according to a logic that is more poetic than scientific.

For the directors, the multiple-location structure of the piece reflects the biology of mycelia, the branching underground threads that make up the body of a fungus, with the mushroom being more like its fruit. Paraphrasing the mycologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake, Calonge said, “Human bodies can only go through one door at once, but mycelia, as a network, can go through many doors at the same time.”

Echoing the movement of these fungal threads, the audience will weave its way through the building, emerging in a different space each time, our human perspective perhaps shifted by what we find there.

Performances are Jan. 8-9 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., Jan. 10 at 2 p.m., 5 p.m., and 8 p.m., and Jan. 11 at 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Tickets available here.

Also playing at Target Margin as part of the Exponential Festival this month are Professional Development (Jan. 13-17), conceived and facilitated by Michael Levinton and Little Lord, and Time Passes (Jan. 23-31), by performance ensemble The Goat Exchange.