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A CurtainUp Review
Mercury Fur
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"A nun! Yes. I was a nun, wasn't I? The voice in my head told me to join this convent in the mountains. Oh, how I loved it there. I would walk in the mountains and hills.
Yes! That's what I was getting at, wasn't it, Papa? The mountains made me sing!" —
Duchess
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Jack DiFalco and Zane Pais (Photo: Monique Carboni)
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You can see why the play caused a sensation when it opened in London in 2005. It's a nasty business. And business is exactly what it comes down to for Elliot (Zane Pais), his gender bender girlfriend, Lola (Paul Iacono), his brother Darren (Jack DiFalco), his boss Spinx (Sea McHale), and new recruit Naz (Tony Revolori). For them the party is a revenue stream, and they let no qualms get in the way of satisfying the well-paying Party Guest's twisted fantasy.
Fear predominates, but escapism also has its place. If you need a break, you can always chomp on a butterfly, the narcotic of choice for discriminating druggies, and be mentally transported to another time and place. Otherwise, you're faced with a deteriorating world in which apartments are torched, the social fabric is torn to shreds, and humanity doesn't seem very humane.
Super-intelligent, buttoned up Elliot deals butterflies, but he never partakes of them himself. He's hard-boiled but protective of his simple-minded sibling, Darren. He orchestrates the "parties" in abandoned apartments with help from Darren and Lola and, for the first time, Naz, who wanders in from an apartment down the hall.
Tonight the client wants to torture Elvis Presley in Vietnam in the person of a pre-teen in a gold lame suit. But things don't exactly proceed according to plan. There are bumps in the road, an unexpected gunshot, and a pre-apocalyptic finale.
While the last twenty minutes of Mercury Fur are pretty gruesome, what comes before is perversely intriguing. Information is parceled out by the spoonful. We see what's on the horizon, but it takes a while for it to come into focus. We're curious. Curiosity evolves into suspense.
The play's slow and steady buildup is well-crafted and its inhabitants well-drawn. A sense of menace is always in the air as we watch the characters take shape before us and witness a panoply of ever-changing emotions with a fairly constant ingredient of self-interest, fueled by the will to survive.
Ridley creates a mounting sense of urgency. The party planners are not particularly nice people, but they have their appealing qualities, as do the actors who play them.
Naz, played by Revolori, Ralph Fiennes's sidekick in The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the most engaging. He has to be. He's new to the party and wants to be invited back. So he's accommodating and charming, eager to please and, as interpreted by Revolori, subtly funny.
Emily Cass McDonnell is the Duchess, a blind, somewhat addled, fragile woman in a peach chiffon gown. She's not involved in organizing the party. She's there because the usually bullying Spinx lovingly takes care of her and has nowhere else to put her. She confuses her own life with that of Maria from The Sound of Music and lets out a snippet of a song when one bubbles up inside her.
Iacono, as Lola, presumably so named in wry tribute to the Kinks' groundbreaking ode to transsexuality, is also engaging. Clad in a miniskirt and a skimpy top to cover her nonexistent breasts, she's restrainedly feminine. Her hair is cut like a boy's, with a little extra volume on top. Her attitude is no nonsense. When she walks across the room, she has a destination, and she's going to get there no matter what.
The fly in the ointment is the Party Guest. The fact that someone would want to torture a young — or any — man is horrifying but not unbelievable. But the Party Guest's lust for young blood fails to convince, mostly because Party Guest doesn't convince. With each of the other characters, we believe a path led them to where they are, even if we know little of it. They have a back story.
But the Party Guest exists in a vacuum. There is no there there. He works on Wall Street, but that's more distracting than enlightening, making us wonder how Wall Street functions in such chaos. He's Ridley's least dynamic character, and Peter Mark Kendall hasn't found a way around that.
New Group artistic director Scott Elliott pulls it all together expertly. Sets (Derek McLane), costumes (Susan Hilferty), lighting (Jeff Croiter), and sound design (M.L. Dogg) all conspire to enhance the alienated, alienating reality of the drama.
If Mercury Fur seems distasteful, that's because it is. But Ridley's ability to construct a story with escalating tension buttressed by quirky humor and gripping details is remarkable.
Editor's Note: Philip Ridley is prolific as well as provocative. Here are links to some of his plays we've reviews:
Leaves of Glass
Shivered
The Fastest Clock In the Universe
Feathers In The Snow
Vincent River
Pitchfork Disney
Pirana Heights
Tender Napalm
Shallow Slumber
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Mercury Fur by: Philip Ridley Director: Scott Elliott Cast: Jack DiFalco (Darren), Bradley Fong (Party Piece), Paul Iacono (Lola), Peter Mark Kendall (Party Guest), Emily Cass McDonnell (Duchess), Sea McHale (Spinx), Zand Pais (Elliott), Tony Revolori (Naz) Scenic Design: Derek McLane Costume Design: Susan Hilferty Lighting Design: Jeff Croiter Sound Design: M.L. Dogg Special Effects Design: Jeremy Chernick Fight Direction UncleDave's Fight-House Production Supervisor: PRF Productions Production Stage Manager: Valerie A. Peterson Running Time: 2 hours, no intermission. The Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street; www.thenewgroup.org From 8/05/15; opening 8/20/15; closing 9/27/15 Reviewed by Michael Bracken based on August 14th performance |
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