In 2012, lightning struck a four-story apartment building in Crown Heights; the roof caught fire and the first three floors burned out. The second floor, where the playwright, composer, lyricist, and performer Heather Christian resided, was filled, floor to ceiling, with water.
Christian was carried out of the building by a firefighter. One of her water-ravaged possessions was a piano purchased with six months' worth of crowdfunding money—she had sold an earlier piano in order to record her first album with her band, the Arbornauts—that had been delivered to her home just four days earlier.
Making matters even worse for Christian was the unshakable feeling that she was somehow responsible for the blaze. "It was such a crazy time," she told Hell Gate. "I was like, oh—I brought this." But as it turns out, that violent and cataclysmic event forced Christian to reset her life and focus on her writing. In that sense, it was responsible for launching the career of one of the city's most captivating artistic voices.
Five years after her building burned down, in 2017, Christian debuted "Animal Wisdom," her first evening-length show, at the Bushwick Starr. The show was recently resurrected at Signature Theatre, with Kenita R. Miller playing H., a role based on Christian herself. "Animal Wisdom" is Christian's theatrical memoir, a tour of the formative experiences and people that have shaped her and, in many cases, haunt her to this day. Among other key figures, we meet her grandmother and grandfather—whose souls inhabit a cardinal bird and her car, respectively—her opinionated piano teacher Doris, and her dashing godfather Myles.
The show is also a concert, séance, a therapy session, a gathering. Much of its score is the music of her upbringing in Mississippi: dirty blues chased with the holy water of gospel music, culminating in Christian's take on a Catholic requiem mass, with a community choir descending on the space and lending it the atmosphere of a house party. Attending one of Christian's shows is to suspect she would make a terrific cult leader. These are deep works—deep of feeling, deep of thought—overflowing with music and meaning, propelled by community and ritual and infused with the transcendent power of the human voice.