‘Soul Notes From the Velvet Elk’ @ Hip Pocket Theatre
Production photos Lauren Alyss Photography; publicity photos Shannon Atkinson
—Ryan Maffei
I went into Hip Pocket Theatre’s new devised piece, the living poem Soul Notes from the Velvet Elk, perfectly unsure what I was about to experience. Going on 24 hours later, I’m not all that closer to clarity. A review in this case is uniquely useless, as sharing anything beyond “you won’t expect it” feels like spoiling the magic trick. The near-supernatural ambience that greets you as you settle into a Hip Pocket show, dying sun giving way to the lightboard’s commands, already lends a glaze of something extra to anything they’ve chosen to stage. Few of their plays even bother to commit to a single style: here’s a space-age drag and puppet show; there’s a musical monster movie; here’s a rock opera plus dance troupe; here’s a porno-chic commedia dell’arte piece.
The center of Soul Notes’ tonal Venn diagram is “David Lynch leading a TM class.” Conceived by Lorca Simons, the UK-based daughter of founder Johnny Simons, Soul Notes is a self-professed tribute to her father, as close as HPT has come to a thematic throughline for their 50-year anniversary celebrations.
“Ask Lorca,” whispered the Soul Notes team reverently as I pressed them, stunned, for answers after the show. Through the lenses of her solar-fire eyes, Lorca’s gaze bore down on my pupils like a pair of doomed ants. But though I found myself just as hypnotized as I had been by the show, insight still proved elusive. Nevertheless, connection—generational, but not merely of that kind—is said to be significant. A press release boasts stirring writing about love, but this show is not merely about love. A cast member asked me not what I thought but if I was moved.
Defining just what Johnny Simons achieved—beyond the not-inconsiderable feat of establishing a peerless and widely famous theatrical enterprise in a singularly atmospheric location (at which most every production qualifies as sui generis)—involves contemplating what became of the hippies, who shifted from “change the system” to “make your own peace” more than half a century ago.
Music aside, not to mention the utopian models Woodstock and other communal experiences represented, the great hippie gift is the ability to imbue anything with significance. This rock, man; this tree, man; that breeze, man. From the moment the actors of Velvet Elk break apart from their breathing cluster, the thirteen players sustain this unhesitating sense of wonder, through passages of varying coherence and impact. But they are not hippies. They’re millennials, feminists, people of color, immigrants.
Not hippies, but performers of mostly later generations, Still, everyone gets their moment in Velvet Elk, as you hope for in a democratically devised piece.
Thad Isbell plays the grounded, winsome compere. Kyle Spencer commands the stage with his street-poet sermons and rapturous musical interludes. Sara Rashelle and Aja Jones both ache through the slow dazzle with different flavors of pain. The always-spirited Harper Caroline Lee has at least three brilliant monologues, one of them completely silent. Elizabeth Bowie brings a dollop of the earthy emotional resonance she simmered with through Raggedy Farm, adding a sparky infusion of mischief she seems to draw from her drop-dead pair of go-go boots. Wolfish Jeff Farrell casually pushes the collective’s physical limits. Holding down different points of light in an unfamiliar galaxy, Dakota Foster, Marius Pfieffer, J.C. Roggenbuck, Carlos Romero Pineda, Rebo Salazar and Dana Ashley Schultes each sustain their own alluring, incandescent streams.
Velvet Elk mostly keeps a straight face, thought at times it cracks a joke, raises a middle finger, or strains so hard through a frozen grin that surrealism is achieved. But Simons rightly identifies the artistic obligation to keep her amorphous artistic cloud from drifting into the perilous realms of preciousness or pretentiousness. Charges of “pretentious” are a pet peeve for this writer – too often the accuser is just saying “over my head” with fewer syllables, as opposed to the correct “fakin’ it.” There are times that Velvet Elk’s relentless vibes are indistinguishable from New Age, its free-association poetry skipping toward doggerel. But every word is meant completely (you can tell by the actors’ faces) and with such a palpably spiritual fervor that it surely qualifies as “saying something” even if no one’s gonna turn it into straight talk. One of the highlights is the testimony of an “Icarus apologist”: the pithy case that “fucking it up” is all any of us dare amount to.
“We humans are not built for too much reality,” our cheery compere reminds us. What I admire about Velvet Elk is that it would go exactly the same way if you were dreaming it. The performers would have the same slightly off quality, their movements and speech patterns rarely aligning with recognizable realism. The strangeness would still feel inextricable from the sincerity. Any logic beyond vague senses of heightening, deescalation and finality would still be hard to locate in the structure.
The music, by pianist Leslie Zvitt and guitarist Darrin Kobetich, would be the same midnight-lamp nightscape, dotted with firefly blips of sound effect. Maddie Goff’s choreo would similarly recall modern-dance milestones cut up into a collage and then translated for the flat-flooted. Nikki DeShea Smith’s lighting would be the usual middle-of-nowhere miracle. Susan Austin’s outfits would be the same minimalist premonition of a techno-tribal costume chest. A drum solo would still be the best moment, the only time that’s happened since Iron Butterfly.
I put my experience of Velvet Elk when, still trying to untangle m Soul Notes into a sensible review, I fantasized that I fell asleep, and found myself half-dreaming about seeing the show again.
I decided it must be a dream because my Lyft was an erudite elk (he told me he buffed up his vocabulary exclusively for the alliteration) in a smoking jacket so flattering I spent the whole night plotting how to steal it. As a Velvet Elk Midnight Riders deluxe affair, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how smooth the trip was, though the 4-star rating I left was because we got into an argument about the Tim Buckley album Lorca Simons may or may not be named for. The elk punctuated things by turning the music up so loud he drowned out my final point. I left him to nestle in the gravel, and slipped into a house/theatre.
It was the same show—but the boundless sense of belief, that hippily contagious commitment to (and collective enthusiasm over) any random idea, was missing. Suddenly, the pink-tinged night sky was unceremoniously dismantled, and suits swarmed the wooden stage like termites coming up for air. We were stuck in a charcoal-grey warehouse, and the former sense that if we left the Hip Pocket’s back-country and ran in any direction it would be days before we reached civilization—all that was shattered.
It was the most desolate feeling…until I woke up, still under the spell of the show I’d really, truly seen, still sure no dream could rival it—and still certain a straightforward review would miss the point completely.
WHEN: September 11-27, 2026
WHERE: 1950 Silver Creek Rd, Fort Worth
WEB: hippocket.org
