The Dark Ride Text

Fragmented, paradoxical, non-linear and told by a revolving cast of narrators, Dark Ride is a quintessentially post-modern text. Dr. Paul Castagno includes Len Jenkin in a group of writers he refers to as “language playwrights.” Including Constance Congdon, Suzan-Lori Parks, Eric Overmeyer and Paula Vogel, the language playwrights came into their own during the 1980s crafting plays that favor rhythm over linearity. Dark Ride, like Parks’ The America Play and Congdon’s Tales of the Lost Formicans, reads a bit more like a piece of jazz music than a dramatic text. Rather than one point of view, multiple narrators vie with each other to tell a multi-faceted story that unfolds like one of M.C. Escher’s famous prints that visually depict paradoxes of infinity and self-reflexivity.

Dark Ride has ten principal characters, fractured archetypes from the seamy margins of American mythos, including a sideshow huckster who travels with a mummified body alleged to be that of John Wilkes Booth, a publisher, a translator, a waitress and a demented jeweler. The characters each begin a quest that leads them to an oculist's convention in Mexico City, where each gives voice to the realization that life has ultimately little more meaning than the dark rides at Coney Island that profoundly influenced Jenkin’s youth.

Typically, a ‘traveler’ character consistent with those found in medieval quest myths, dominates Jenkins’s plays. According to Castagno,

The traveler keeps the play moving. The fact that the mover is in crisis, and presented with obstacles or distractions, provides a dramatic grounding or level of interest, however absurd the crisis may appear. The traveler figure is by nature an outsider, and being outside of his element creates the tension or energy in the play.

Dark Ride’s dominant character is a Thief whose action of stealing a stone loosely based on the famous hope diamond from the Jeweller character, excites the play’s quest metaphor. As he roams the back roads of America, the Thief, more than any other character offers the audience some sense of place and timeline.

In describing the style of the language playwrights, Castagno borrows the term ‘dialogic’ from 20th century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who “first coined the term dialogism  . . . to re-evaluate certain nineteenth century Russian novels that could not be categorized into traditional genres.” For Bakhtin “these hybrid novels juxtaposed sophisticated literary techniques with storytelling elements drawn from folk culture, while other texts featured an array of linguistic styles, dialects, neologisms, and slang.”

According to Castagno, each often-contradictory voice gives the dialogic text “freer reign than traditional mono-logic formats.” Dark Ride is an interactive metaphor system in which each element is in dialogue with the other elements in the play. An evil Jeweller named Ravensburg punctuates the journey with tales of historical figures, some actually and some fictively associated with the results of the Hope Diamond’s alleged curse. Elements these historical figures find a way into the biography of each character; although never enough to truly identify play character with historical character, there is just enough connection to insinuate shadows of possibility.