A show for men, women and any sentient robots passing through, “Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future” at Ars Nova is a little musical with big, sad, beautiful ideas. It packs so much story into so little space that physicists will quail.
Welcome to 2268 or thereabouts. We’ve colonized the moon and thanks to some handy forced labor, we’re terraforming Mars, too. On a small stage at a subterranean Virginia club called the Over/Under, the folk singer Rags Parkland (Andrew R. Butler, who also wrote the book, music and lyrics) tunes up. A veteran of several space missions and a study in survivor’s guilt, he has returned to earth to sing some interplanetary homesick blues.
Mr. Butler is a multi-instrumentalist in a scraggly wig. (Wait, maybe it’s not a wig. Whoops!) His Rags speaks softly and carries a small banjo. In his verses and his brief, between-song patter, he fills us in on the last couple of centuries of human endeavor — struggle, genocide, a tentative tech-forward peace. Eventually, a band joins Rags, but to say too much about how they arrive would sour the fun and distress of discovery.
How can a world this sparsely sketched feel this wide? Reading the script I realized that lyrics in the first song that had whizzed by as ordinary metaphor — “Some folks live a few lives/And some people barely live one” — were communicating crucial details. An early goofy number, “Android Love Song” (“Your heart’s a clock that says tick tock/And boy does that clock go”), is actually a tragedy, but you won’t figure it out until much later.
The form of “Rags Parkland,” directed with stealthy verve by Jordan Fein, isn’t all that futuristic. You can recognize it from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” or evenings with Kiki & Herb or Jomama Jones or Ethan Lipton’s Joe’s Pub efforts — shows that use the scaffolding of a concert to tell a story. But this fusion of folk and science fiction is niftily sui generis. Imagine “Blade Runner” scored by Woody Guthrie or a Janis Joplin bioplay scripted by Isaac Asimov and you’re halfway there.
The show was pushed back a week after some freak water damage and maybe the set designer Laura Jellinek embraced this as a style choice, because the Ars Nova auditorium looks beaten up. The carpet is worn, the risers are scuffed, lights dangle from the broken insulation tiles in the ceiling. The space has all the home comforts of a fallout shelter. Well, a fallout shelter that serves rosé.
Mr. Butler’s music, a plangent folk style that broadens into roots rock, makes just about every syllable count. The show’s construction is so deft and its narrative so tantalizing that breathers — a whistled bridge, a harmonica breakdown — are almost unbearable.
As for the band, there’s the vocalist Beaux Weathers (Stacey Sargeant,) her dreads adorned with cowrie shells and golden wire, her voice smooth and rough as the songs demand. The saxophonist Gill (Tony Jarvis) channels Clarence Clemons and he can really wear a cowboy hat. The accordionist Rick Burkhardt, dressed like a psychedelic polka enthusiast, is played by the accordionist Rick Burkhardt. They’re all supported by Jessie Linden and Debbie Christine Tjong’s nimble rhythm section.
So far, so singalong. But what makes “Rags Parkland” significant and surreptitiously moving is that this is a political show, though its politics sidle in so sinuously you might not notice them. Rags describes an era in which cyborgs — “constructed humans” seems to be their preferred term — have been outlawed by the government and subject to “deconstruction” if captured. (And no, they don’t mean that in some fun Jacques Derrida way.) This underground club, a place where humans of all circuitry have historically, illegally come together, is equipped with perimeter alarms. When one of them sounds, the whole room holds its breath.
This hush testifies to Mr. Butler’s success in enmeshing us in his story. It also pushes us to think of other groups that have been interdicted, demonized, in America’s past and also in America’s right now. Still, the show holds out hope for a nation that tries to take care of its people. “Instead of making them,” as Rags says, “just to destroy them.”
Rags Parkland Sings The Songs Of The Future
Through Nov. 3 at Ars Nova, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
