From history into a world of puppet poetry: the fascinating, elusive challenge of Object of Divinity

Object of Divinity (Stage 3, Nordic Studio Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Object of Divinity is a strangely timeless and timely story that underpins this enigmatic human/puppet show by actor/playwright Calla Wright, with an electro-industrial score, created and performed live by SILKRØAD.

They have unearthed from the mists of history (misty to me, at least) an amazing real-life 18th century figure, “the Public Universal Friend,” a gender-less nameless pronoun-less preacher, who’d been born female, with Quaker-esque views on slavery, emancipation, and war.

Wright has wrested a sort of beyond-trans story, a mother and child (Wright and Maya Wright), domestic rejection, religious crisis, from this shadowy self-created character who actually lived from 1752 to 1819. And they’ve imagined the trauma of their origins at a time when a female outside social conventions was a vessel awaiting — no, inviting — possession by gathering demonic forces. “Even the faithful are afraid in the end.”

The puppet iconography transforms homely objects; call it a performance installation.  The puppets, who “enter” the piece after a long introductory monologue by Wright as a kind of evangelist, are extrapolated, I think, from the story of the Public Universal Friend: outsized chalk-white objects including a hairbrush, a plumed pen that writes in invisible ink on a white sheet, a hand with many fluttering fingers that won’t stay still.

Can I explain this? I’m afraid not. The historical narrative of the Public Universal Friend — a self-reinventing character who puts themself deliberately out of time and possibly this world — is fascinating. But Object of Divinity moves beyond the “story” to unspool theatrically as a challenge so stylized and allusive that meaning seems always, deliberately, always, just beyond the grasp of the fingers (at least mine). It’s more a poetic fantasia than a “play,” by one of our most challenging artists.