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A CurtainUp Review
The Woman Before
Jeremiah Miller & Christen Clifford
(Photo: Monique Carboni.) |
The playwright tries too hard to unsettle and provoke the audience, as the family in the midst of moving from the place they've lived in for nineteen years is unsettled by the arrival of a woman who has come to collect on a promise she claims the man of the house made to her twenty--four years ago -- the promise being that he would love her forever. The play which begins with the mundane busyness of moving but almost instantly turns into a macabre long day's journey into night. The violent events turn what starts as a family drama into what the promotional literature identifies as a noirish thriller, but what is in fact more bizarre than noirish.
Matters are not helped by Daniel Fish's direction and staging which is as irritating and wrong-headed as anything I've seen in a long while. For starters, Fish has opted to remove one of the chief advantages that a production in a small theater has -- the closeness between audience and actors. Instead of watching a performance at close range, the Here audience sees everything as if sitting in the last two or three rows of a Broadway theater. In Malve Lippman's pale wood equivalent of a Greek amphitheater everything takes place all the way upstage.
Even if you brought opera glasses (a piece of equipment usually superfluous for off-off-Broadway theater goers), you'd be hard pressed to see what any of the five actors look like since Mr. Fish's idea of giving the play that so-called noirish edge is to have lighting designer Peter West keep the actors not only distant but in the shadows. Another attempt at giving the play a Wooster Group sensibility is to have some of the actors speak into mikes which only manages to add to the overall pretentiousness and made me wonder if all of this might perhaps work better as a radio play. Given these hazy glimpses of the actors leaves me hard put to comment on their performances.
In fairness to the playwright, his stage directions do not call for the miked dialogue or having the husband and father's long-ago lover pop out of a packing carton. And in equal fairness to the director, Schimmelpfennig's bent for having various characters echo each other's experience is rather obvious here (e.g. the son and his girl friend's soon to be ended love affair mirrors the love affair his father is forced to remember twenty-four years later). The long inner monologues that are also something of a hallmark for the playwright are in this instance less sharp and crackly than tedious.
The play is mercifully short. However, at least for this viewer, there were times when the sixty minutes felt like six hours.
For a review of Push-Ups
go here
|
THE WOMAN BEFORE Playwright: Roland Schimmelpfenning, translated by David Tushingham Directed by Daniel Fish Cast: Christen Clifford, Cynthia Mace, Ronald Marx, Jeremiah Miller and Diana Ruppe. Set Design: Malve Lippmann Costume Design: Melissa Schlachtmeyer Lighting Design: Peter West Sound Design: Elizabeth Rhodes Dramaturgy: Dagmar Domrös. Running time: 60 minutes HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Avenue SmartTix 212-868-4444 From 5/05/06 to 5/26/06. Tickets: $19 Reviewed by Elyse Sommer based on May 6th performance |
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