The titular “long line of broken white people” in “The Axe” are Wilde’s blood ancestors, whom Wilde traces back to the once-Slavic inhabitants of what is now Stolpe, Germany, where “Axe” was created during an artistic residency. The thesis driving “Axe”—the realization that Wilde is calling on to cultivate empathy for the politically conservative relatives Wilde declares “deeply fucked up”—is that pre-Christian Europeans were violently torn from their earth- and community-connected Pagan spirituality by the Vikings and Romanized Germans. 

In “Axe,” Wilde bounces through a Norwegian folk dance called the Halling and picks up two Styrofoam pool noodles, using them to beat the rubber exercise ball like a Taiko drum. In the longest section, they strip off the mechanic’s suit and, wearing tiny black shorts and kneepads, throws life and limb at the ball and the walls, Contact Improvisation-style, while a voiceover delivers text backed by effectively thudding beats from Oakland composer Fractal Drip. “This is a dance putting up a Christmas tree on the solstice and not knowing the practice comes from German pagans burning a Yule log on the coldest night,” Wilde’s voiceover laments, ranging freely to other matters: “This is a dance that knows the genocide in Gaza is the story of how the west was won.” 

The actions of Wilde and the rubber exercise ball become decreasingly interesting, but the text does not. Unlike the trance-like litanies Sara Shelton Mann wrote for Contraband, Wilde’s writing builds rather than loops. And unlike his mentor Keith Hennessy’s raging monologues, the text holds a strange tenderness at its core, devoid of self-righteousness, more concerned with genuinely lamenting the pathological harm perpetuated by cycles of guilt and sublimated shame.

The last section of “Axe” is a riveting piece of cathartic theater. “I learned I cannot heal myself by erasing my ancestors,” Wilde says. And then, with disbelief and grief, they add, “St. Boniface cut down the village’s sacred oak and used the tree’s wood to build a church.” 

Wilde grabs an axe and begins hacking at the wood pole, sweat and wood chips flying. For complicated reasons—a fear that the axe might go flying into the audience among them—I became scared. I also noted a growing desire to talk with Wilde, to ask whether they believed it possible to be non-toxically religious in a way inspired by what Jesus actually taught, rather than the violent directions so much of institutional Christianity took off in. As the wooden pole finally cracked, and Wilde dropped to the floor in exhaustion, I came to feel that my desire to talk with Wilde meant the performance had been successful. Meanwhile, the audience was on its feet.