I moved to the West coast ten years ago. One thing I have always regretted was not traveling by land to get here. I imagine the physical passage through the enormous American landscape to be a profound, challenging, dramatic experience. Much of "Awesome"’s West re-imagines and replicates this romantic journey, the expansive and rocky landscape, an existential ennui through history and consciousness; an epic three-act musical adventure/meditation of isolation and solitude, movement and stasis, memory and fantasy on a grand, operatic scale.

In "West," their epic-scale and near-epic-length new show at On the Boards, the video wizardry of "Awesome" (always in quotes) has taken a quantum leap. The white silhouette of a galloping horse ripples across a rugged backdrop. A night-sky is unveiled inside a packing crate. Trickles of blood drip down from where you least expect them. These fancy flourishes are all part of a dreamlike meditation on the myths and transformations of the American West that's both ambitious and ambiguous.

by Anne Blackburn

West is a magic realism of baggage. West is all places and no place at all, inhabited by ghosts and mirages, fever dreams and deep thirst, outsized characters for expansive spaces. West has limpid harmonies, broken surfaces, collisions of rustic myths and digital manifestations, spaces that defy themselves. West is what a musical might be if it were allowed to go feral. About time.