 |
|
In theory, anyway. Though Grimm has sketched out a thoughtful portrait of six lives in various states of decline, neither he, director Kate Whoriskey, nor a cast led by Nina Arianda and Michael Esper seals the deal. What should be a strangulating exposition on class and classlessness in a community falling apart becomes a draggy and confused two-and-a-half hour exposition that's forever at odds with its own best intentions. And the one thing you'd think would be the easiest to get right—the tone—is the one thing most consistently wrong. It doesn't appear so at first, however. The opening scene features a half-light view of a man and a woman engaging in some cautious back-and-forth, some reluctant payment, and then some frantic, quickly completed sex. But who are they? As it turns out, she is Heléna Altman (Arianda), a former society woman who's been pushed down to the brink of poverty and forced into a ramshackle apartment (and, yes, peddling her personal wares) after her husband died in combat. She's maintained a maid, Edda (Kathleen Chalfant), a couple of pieces of furniture, and not much else from her previous, more exalted life. Heléna's "night job" is appropriately a secret that she keeps from both Edda and her old friend Mutzi (Tina Benko), who has a habit of visiting and saying exactly the wrong thing at the right time. (Her newest discourse is speaking quite disapprovingly about another mutual acquaintance who has joined the oldest profession for similar reasons.) Hoping to pull Heléna from the funk she's in, Mutzi invites her to the symphony along with her own mystery-man escort, who turns out to be Béla Hoyos (Esper), a reporter for the city's leading worker's newspaper. And, of course, the man to whom Heléna sold herself a few nights earlier. It's a scorching setup that makes for a tension-packed first-act curtain, especially when Heléna, suffused with a myriad of conflicting emotions, breaks down in tears at the prospect of introducing herself to the man she already knows intermittently. There are endless potential destinations for this, with blackmail, revenge, thought-provoking debates critiquing the warring capitalist and socialist worldviews, and searing Hedda Gabler-esque speeches about independence and feminist choice-making among the most likely. Alas, Grimm's commitment to Heléna's social-sexual plight vanishes sometime during intermission. When we meet these characters again, they're convening—for no good reason I could discern—in the cemetery that houses Heléna's husband's memorial. (His body was never found.) Various, um, trysts, picnics, and blithe discussions here defuse the first act's taut suspense, and build to a climactic event that is at once eye-rollingly predictable and parodically far-fetched. This, in turn, sets up Act III, back in Heléna's rooms, to answer a few questions but leave the broader and more captivating issues unaddressed. What begins as a serious exploration of these still-topical matters ends as anything but, and tapers off into the ether just when it should be acquiring the electrifying substance of a Clifford Odets political play. Rather than propose, execute, and deconstruct arguments, Grimm expects you to take everything on faith—if not one anyone else subscribes to. Seeing only Heléna's assignation with Béla does not reinforce the act as a major change in life course, for example. Worse, Heléna's situation doesn't seem as fraught as she insists it is. Grimm has scripted so much of the dialogue in contemporary casual vernacular that you're not exactly transported back a hundred years to begin with. Factor in John Lee Beatty's structurally effective but too-expansive and too-rich set and Anita Yavich's costumes, and under Whoriskey's leadership practically nothing onstage conveys the vital notion that you're watching a woman who's supposed to be teetering on the brink of destitution. Nor does Arianda. In her previous turns in Venus in Fur and Born Yesterday, she proved she could straddle both sides of the high-low divide, but here she's just lost. She becomes most gripping as Heléna is increasingly forced to confront the consequences others' actions are having on her existence. The rest of the time, her bearing the looks, voice, and behavior of a blasé middle-class Manhattanite project no detectable tragedy, let alone the air of someone who's already fallen most of the way. Arianda's Heléna is too much a woman who's always been where she is, and comfortable with that position. For the most part, the other actors fare better, though Esper at times reads as too tony to convince as the man of the people Béla supposedly is. Chalfant and Benko have pegged the style of the speech and the comedy of their respective low- and high-born characters, and breeze through lines and scenes with a reassuring light-footedness. In smaller roles as wildly divergent admirers of Heléna, Michael Goldsmith and Lucas Hall both reflect and play nicely off of her unusual allure. But for Tales From Red Vienna, the affection that matters most is what each person has for his or her ideals: fortune, status, romance, socialism, what have you. It's only through them that a crumbling world can be rebuilt, but the passion and spirit that should drive these people to both great heights and repulsive depths have apparently been left on the battlefield with the bodies. Their sacrifice might make a stronger impact if you better understood what any of the survivors was fighting for.
Tales From Red Vienna
|
