A bleak but brilliant portrait of a tragedy
CLARK GABLE made his Broadway debut in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 drama about the true story of Ruth Snyder, who was executed for murdering her husband.
Thanks to its subject matter it’s a tough play to enjoy, but thanks to Natalie Abrahami’s intensely focused revival, re-set in Sixties New York and starring Emily Berrington, the production is easy to admire.
To me, capital punishment stories sometimes feel like capital punishment. But Treadwell’s play has other qualities. In particular, her terse dialogue foreshadows Samuel Beckett with its rattle and repetition.
It’s a style that suits the episodic story jumping from subway to the heroine’s garret home, her honeymoon hotel, a speakeasy, a courtroom and her prison cell. The play also has the headlong drive of Greek tragedy. Abrahami delivers an impressively drilled show, and the mixed-race casting adds the civil rights struggle of the Sixties to the didactic thrust of Treadwell’s feminism.
Miriam Buether’s set design, meanwhile, turns the stage into a tomb on which ominous giant shutters rise and fall between scenes. The most impressive feature, though, is the acting.
Emily Berrington cuts a beatific, yet anguished, figure. Her extraordinary disembodied stare renders her unusually haunted — and haunting. She can be explosively visceral, too: her presence is languid, yet lethal.
Berrington is also sustained by an exceptional company including Jonathan Livingstone as the sweet, creepy husband. Dwane Walcott is sinister and non-committal in the Clark Gable role of the lover, while Denise Black and Nathalie Armin add touches of scorn and tenderness as the mother and nurse.
A bleak snapshot of U.S. society, but vivid and chastening, too.