"Hermitage' at Philadelphia Fringe Festival

Can our inclinations to collect and amass things become perverse and even life-threatening? The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, hoarded 180 tons of materials in their Harlem mansion by the time of their deaths in 1947. By vividly re-telling their story Hermitage answers the question clearly but leaves some of the packrat brothers' mystery intact.

As written and directed by Frederick Anderson, Hermitage is sympathetic to the strange, hermetic lives of brothers who are now part of urban folklore. Its subject has resonated with other writers, including E.L. Doctorow's recently published novel, Homer and Langley (which extends the brothers' lives into the 1980s) as well as Ghostly Men, a non-fiction account by Franz Lidz. There's even a new reality show on the A&E channel called "Hoarders" that documents other modern-day Collyers.

Through a narrative that goes forward and back in time, Anderson's play tries to understand these brothers, born of the Gilded Age and living in a Victorian mansion in a demographically changing Harlem. Langley (Thomas Weaver) and Homer (Christopher Schimpf) are well portrayed in their evolution into isolation and hoarding, with Homer becoming blind and immobile, and clinging emotionally to his brother Langley, whose madness becomes ever more evident. Of course their 180 tons of junk— which included floor-to-ceiling newspapers and a model T Ford— don't make it into this performance space, and the actors and director make a credible effort at allowing us to imagine these imprisoning materials (which ultimately crushed Langley to death, leaving Homer to starve to death).

An able supportive cast of Alana Gerlach, Kate Wand and Wendy Staton portrayed the brothers' tenuous connections to family and the outer world. This is an urban Grimm's Tale worth recounting the next time we're tempted to plunge into the attic or basement.