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We'll get to that later. For now, it suffices to say that director Scott Elliott and set designer Derek McLane immerse you visually in Ridley's wonderfully unwieldy world from the instant you enter the theater. "Slum" doesn't even come close to approximating this horror of a living space, unless it's a slum three weeks after a nuclear apocalypse. The boarded-up windows, the disintegrating walls, the ruined furniture—all are familiar, yet worse than it seems like they could or should be, as if the hope and spirit that can pervaded even the basest dwellings gave up on this place long ago. It is, in short, somewhere you'd only go because there was nowhere else to do something you didn't want anyone else to know about. Okay, then, enter brothers Elliot (Zane Pais) and Darren (Jack DiFalco), who seem to arrive for just that purpose—after they finish some cleaning, that is. They're determined the get the place presentable, precisely outfitted with snacks (cocktail peanuts), drinks (beer), and homey furnishings (afghans for the chairs) in pursuit of... well, that's not exactly obvious yet. But we imagine we'll get it as soon as they do. Not quite. It's during this first scene that the problems with Mercury Fur begin cropping up. Ridley's writing is intentionally obtuse, obstructing our absorption of the situation beyond a glittering-gutter patois that occasionally sort of sounds poetic but is typically just dressed-up invective (the most, uh, lyrical moments are not printable), and in any case doesn't say anything. And though they eventually meet someone else, a down-the-hall pseudo-neighbor boy named Naz (Tony Revolori), even exposure to him does not shine light on their plight. More people parade in with fancy names and odd titles—Lola (Paul Iacono), Party Piece (Bradley Fong), Duchess (Emily Cass McDonnell), and Spinx (Sea McHale), the apparent mastermind behind all this—suggesting an anonymization at least and a corruption at worst, the devolution of society or maybe just our perception of it. Even so, there's no specific hint as to what this all means or why we ought to care. Once we get that this Manhattan-like wasteland is eating alive these people the way they chow down on butterflies (it's best not to dwell on that), which we do quickly, we need more. It's only with the appearance of the final character, Party Guest (Peter Mark Kendall), a well-scrubbed, vaguely sophisticated young man of outwardly good breeding, at nearly the three-quarters point of the two-hour evening, that the pieces finally start coming together. Alas, when they do, the picture becomes substantially less interesting than you might think it is up front. In fact, despite all the gratuitous swearing, insults, and bizarre pop-culture echoes (Duchess finds herself singing an imagined song that sounds a lot like something from The Sound of Music, for example), it's what comes after that's almost oppressively, parodically provocative, as though it doesn't follow, or is one step too far beyond, what we've already seen. The play, for all its cleverness and color, is lost at this point: You can't go that long with all build-up and no payoff if the ultimate payoff isn't extravagant, if not ecstasy-inducing. What's here is a bare extension of Ridley's prevailing idea: that society is on the edge, there's not much difference between the best of us and the worst of us, and even in such situations we're constantly fighting against our own animalistic natures just to stay afloat. True? Perhaps. Insightful? Not so much for me, but your mileage may vary. In any event, it's more manipulative than it is mesmerizing, and more repetitive than revealing about any necessary aspect of the human character. The performances all share a sheen of plasticky artifice, much like the writing; they don't make it any easier than Ridley does to accept anything here as even heightened fact. They're also pretty labored, particularly for McConnell, who seems to be going for hollowed-out crack-whore but ends up somewhere closer to sleepwalking secretary. McHale has an appealing Ethan Hawke air about him that lets him register as simultaneously tortured and libidinous, but Spinx is almost too improbably constructed for that to matter. Elliott's staging is heavy on the brutality and the claustrophobia, and his concept of last-ditch zoo cage (for the characters and for us) pumps up the urgency to appropriately theatrical levels. Still, he can't compensate for the purpose and drive that are missing, and might make Mercury Fur more than restless exercise in quasi-dystopian navel-gazing. It's as though you've shared your deepest, darkest dreams with someone you implicitly trusted, only to have your confession met with a gaping yawn.
Mercury Fur
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