Review: Welcome to ‘Illinoise,’ Land of Love, Grief and Zombies

Key Facts

Instead, in the show, which opened on Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Stevens’s wistful and sometimes enigmatic numbers, set in various Illinois locations, are performed by three vocalists on platforms high above the action, wearing butterfly wings as if to stay aloft.
As they collect around a clump of lanterns that suggest an urban campfire — the poetic set, including upside-down trees, is by Adam Rigg — they engage in what seems to be a rite of passage: the sharing of deep truths with sympathetic friends.
They are “read” (that is, danced) from notebooks decorated, again, with butterflies, suggesting the privacy of cocoons and the fragility of emergence.
More about Jesse Green A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2024, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Land of Love and Zombies.