A fated marriage’s ‘Retreat From Moscow’

New Haven Theater Company readies Nicholson play

Margaret Mann, director of the New Haven Theater Company’s seasonopening play Thursday, brought the script to the collaborating troupe and enlisted John Watson as codirector.

“But this play was my passionate pitch,” said Mann in a phone chat the other day.

The last time we spoke with the codirectors, it was about the NHTC’s humorous “Love Song,” which is a gentler look at a mature marriage. This one tracks an older couple’s marriage going underwater like the damaged Titanic.

But we’ll let the title employ the main metaphor: “Retreat From Moscow” is

William Nicholson’s (repeated) allusion to the slowmotion collapse of an English marriage, based on the Napoleonic Army’s historic retreat from said city.

“It’s basically three characters — a longmarried couple, they’ve been together for 33 years, and they have an adult son. And the married couple

are being played by Susan and George Kulp,” said Mann. “It’s very different from ‘Love Song.’ They’re just such good actors; it’s really fun to watch them discover these people.”

The son is played by Kiel Stango, who has done work at Square One Theatre in Stratford and elsewhere.

“It’s a story of a marriage ... coming apart. One is more aware of it than the other,” said Mann. “It’s an imbalance in the marriage; it becomes pretty evident early on.”

The play ran to mixed reviews on Broadway in 2003 with John Lithgow and Eileen Atkins as the couple Edward and Alice. Nicholson, known for writing the screenplay of “Shadowlands,” knows how to build a play and its characters, but a couple of reviewers thought the wife Alice’s hard edge and the husband’s pedantic character made it dreary.

Mann references another production as her entry point to the play’s worthiness.

“Actually, I played Alice in 2009, I was recruited to play Alice ... out in Oregon,” she said. “I read the play and I loved it, and I still love it.”

Mann called it a “quasi autobiographical play. You probably know people whose parents split when they were adults . ... They’re all good people; they want to do the good thing, you know? ... And sometimes you just can’t hold it together. So the play is about ... a change of heart and the impact it has on (husband) Edward and us and Jamie, their son.

NHTC performs in a small, blackbox space at the rear of the English Building Markets site on Chapel Street, just south of Church Street. It’s an experience you should try at least once, for sure.

As for the hard edges of the Alice character, “I stressed the fact that I don’t want Alice to be a ... witch. She has her own agenda; she’s a very human character. We’ve all known characters in marriages you sort of say, ‘Oh, do you see how they talk to each other?’ When you take each other for granted and you assume that something is going to continue and then, you know, it doesn’t.”

Edward is a history teacher, noted Mann, “and he’s also stuck in his ways. But something woke him up recently and he’s gettin’ off the train, so to speak. And then Jamie’s caught in between.”

“It’s about human beings caught up in ... their own mess,” said Mann, who added that it’s not as grim as it sounds. “There are some funny bits. I mean it is British, so it’s not laughoutloud, fall out of your seats. But there’s some very funny moments and we’re exploring them.”