Ben
Brantley

January 11, 2016

An unkempt Kansas City disc jockey named Ray has appointed himself an altar boy at the exalted shrine of jazz, and his faith burns like a five-alarm fire. Embodied with respect and ferocity by Frank Boyd in “The Holler Sessions,” which runs through Friday at the Paradise Factory, Ray radiates a hard-core obsessiveness that’s both scary and contagious. You get the feeling that he wears sunglasses inside not to be cool, but because the light he’s seen is so bright. Part of P.S. 122’s Coil Festival 2016, “The Holler Sessions,” performed and written by Mr. Boyd in collaboration with the experimental theater group the TEAM (with Rachel Chavkin and Josh Aaseng as consulting directors), creates a convincing portrait of a monomaniac that, for all its flashiness, never blocks the view of the object of his passion. Yes, Ray, with his hyperkinetic delivery and sweaty sense of urgency, is a watch-me kind of guy. But what he really wants is for us to listen — not to him, but to the discs he spins from a slovenly broadcast room (designed and lighted by Eric Southern), where he subsists on gulps of coffee, whiskey, apples and peanuts.