8/27/2019 Review: "Eyes Up High in the Redwood Tree" celebrates Ken Kesey | The Princetonian

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Review: "Eyes Up High in the Redwood Tree" celebrates

Ken Kesey
By Caroline Hertz (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/staff/caroline-hertz) | Apr 8, 2015
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From its first moments —when Ken Kesey leaps out of the audience onto a stage patterned with light, sporting a fraying straw hat,
the poetry of e.e. cummings still lingering in his mouth —Annika Bennett ’15’s new play “Eyes Up High In the Redwood Tree” reveals
its intention to tell two stories at once: one personal, the other generational.
And so you embark on a two-and-a-half-hour long acid trip that both charts the fluctuation of Kesey’s personal allegiances (to tribe
or to family?) and documents how this spiritual guru (perhaps best known for his work “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) shaped
an entire generation full of readers, writers and activists. Every aspect of this production devotes itself to giving the sense that
everyone in the theater is on one collective trip: We’re warned in the program about strobe lights, anachronism and vampire bats.
The run time is listed as “somewhere between two hours and 50-70 years, depending on how you look at it.” The pre-show features
Kesey (Matt Seely ’15) speaking into a mic that distorts his voice, reading from a book of poetry and heckling the crowd. Throughout
the play, voice amplification and distortion is used to mimic the distortion of the senses under drug influence. It’s less historical
fiction, more historical fancy.
The play mostly follows Kesey and his band of tripped out, hippie-esque followers, who travel by renegade school-bus from their
colorful, ragtag camp in Oregon to New York City for the release of Kesey’s second book. But the route is far from linear, and the
story is constantly looping forward to give us flashes of the future — where, decades later, each of Kesey’s followers is still struggling
to make sense of that ecstatic summer.
“Eyes Up High” is one of the rare student-written plays that receives a fully-produced, fully-designed, department-funded run in the
vast Berlind Theatre. And what a production: the set in particular is an effusive, kaleidoscopic optical illusion, continually recreating
itself into forest commune, jail cell or school bus. The lavishly finger-painted jumble of elements may seem like a hodgepodge, but
there’s intelligent form within the seeming formlessness, and each element transforms with delicious cleverness to carry us forward.
It’s an exciting endeavor — the entire team, including director and Lewis Center theater professor Tim Vasen, had just a few short
weeks to put this piece together, with playwright Bennett busily revising every day as the rehearsal process revealed new insights.
Bennett originally hails from the same town as Kesey, and her personal connection to the man is apparent: though a few doubts and
reservations come up along the way, “Eyes Up High” nevertheless truly believes in the euphoric communitarian spirit it exalts. We
share the joy of the blissed-out members of this forest commune.
Thematically, the question of celebrity looms large. For these people, including a journalist who tags along for the summer fun,
Kesey is a literary and cultural messiah. His ideas dominate their lives — quite literally for one character, who is gradually turning
into paper as he inspires more and more of Kesey’s written work. At one point, one of Kesey’s followers, charmingly named Junebug,
voices her discomfort that their commune is so far from egalitarian. “It’s his trip,” she complains, and this production dedicates itself
to upholding that point of view. Kesey directs all the stage magic: “It’s night,” he commands, and immediately the lights go blue and
crickets begin to sound. He asks for light, and when a spotlight snaps to attention, he purrs, “That’s gorgeous, thanks.”
The surrounding characters speak not as themselves, but as Kesey’s versions of them. Filtered through Kesey’s consciousness, they
all speak a touch more playfully and a touch more opulently than ordinary mortals. At one point, the pregnant Junebug (Maeli
Goren ’15) confides in Carrie Ann (another Kesey follower, played by Evelyn Giovine ’16), about how she wakes up with the unsaid

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8/27/2019 Review: "Eyes Up High in the Redwood Tree" celebrates Ken Kesey | The Princetonian
words of her baby tucked under her tongue, its jumbled phrases caught in her eyelashes — about how frightened she is of the baby’s
impatience with the fact that she cannot understand it. The language, sacred and vibrant, is one of the most successful qualities of
Bennett’s promising work. Kesey is represented as the self-absorbed creator, the source of a constant silly-string flow of imagination
that transforms the stage. The play manages to celebrate Kesey’s imagination while keeping a critical distance from his ego, and it
achieves this in large part through the character of Kesey’s wife Viv, played by Anna Aronson ’16. The victim of Kesey’s selfish,
relentless neglect, Viv does her best to maintain some semblance of a home while he’s away. A major question in this play is whether
Viv’s building resentment over Kesey’s abandonment will inhibit their reconciliation when Kesey finally goes home to her.
There’s a considerable amount of fat that needs to be trimmed from this play, which sometimes second-guesses whether its thematic
point has landed and needlessly reiterates itself. And two and a half hours of attention without an intermission is no small favor to
ask of an audience. But the exultant humanity of this play is hard to resist, and why would you want to? At one point in the show,
Ken Kesey asks, “Isn’t it all true? Even if it didn’t happen?” This play is still in development; there are bumps that need smoothing,
places where the play doesn’t quite “happen” the way it wants to. But more than that, this play is True. And on account of that, it
deserves our attention.
 
4 out of 5 paws
PROS: gripping themes, beautiful language
CONS: occasionally sluggish

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