‘Events’ fills Curran space with gritty, intense drama
A vast, empty theater becomes an eloquent setting for a lone woman’s extreme crisis of faith — and an unflinching gaze into the terrible banality of evil — in “The Events,” the touring Scottish play that opened the Curran: Under Construction series Wednesday. A heavenly choir in street clothes helps universalize the grittily particular in David Greig’s remarkably compact, unsettling drama.
It’s an extraordinary opening for the city’s newest alternative performance series, and one with an unusually high profile. With producer Carole Shorenstein Hays’ Curran Theatre closed for renova-
tion of its lobbies, bathrooms and auditorium (not due to reopen until January 2017), she is presenting a series of mostly edgy or experimental works, with the audience seated onstage with the performance.
The arrival is an event in itself. Entry is through the dramatically lit alley next to the theater — just follow the big red arrows — and an ornate blue stage door with large gilt hinges. The audience sits in four rows facing the auditorium, beneath the towering empty space of the stage’s high fly loft. The ghostly glow of the Curran’s old, massive and wondrously ornate crystal chandelier looms in the distance above a half-curtain behind the risers occupied by a choir almost as multiethnic as the city.
The play seems to emerge from the choir, anchoring director Ramin Gray’s Actors Touring Company production of a tale of mass murder in each community it visits, with local choirs not only providing the musical accompaniment but also interacting with the performers. The golden tones and lush harmonies of the Most Holy Redeemer Church choir seemed to amplify the play’s intense soulsearching Wednesday; the U4C Chorus will accompany the performances Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25-26.
A driven Lesley Hart takes over directing the choir as Claire, a lesbian priest in clerical collar and blue jeans, trying, in what’s probably a flashback she can’t escape, to welcome a silent, staring new arrival, the Boy (a magnetic Clifford Samuel). It soon becomes clear what’s eating at Claire and how deeply. As she describes her frayed psyche, and its impact on her relationship with her partner, Catriona (“She makes yurts”), she drops details of events (“hiding in the music room”) that evoke a British equivalent of the horrific 2011 Anders Breivik massacre in Norway.
Claire is obsessed — not only because of her personal trauma but also because of what it means to her spiritual calling. Was the killer, still alive and in prison, mad? Or was he evil? And what does such evidence of evil mean? We’re drawn ever more deeply into her obsession by Greig’s taut, poetically spare and episodic writing and Hart’s riveting, constantly self-questioning performance, but also by Samuel’s assured, mercurial presence in every other role — from concerned counselors and an evasive right-wing politician (the killer identified with his racist rhetoric) to a caring, frustrated Catriona and the chillingly ordinary murderer.
Gray, who has staged every Actors Touring “Events” since the multiaward-winning 2013 original in Edinburgh (the American tour is presented in association with New York Theatre Workshop), keeps escalating the tension by incremental steps. Musical director Joe Bunker, also from the original production (as are the designers), deftly follows suit at the piano and directing the choir on familiar hymns, folk and punk tunes, and original works by John Browne.
Violence erupts, but it provides no relief to the dramatic immediacy of the social and spiritual question at hand. What resolution there is comes from the actors, Greig’s all-too-real final plot twist and from the choir in the form of Browne’s beautiful contemporary hymn, “We’re All Here.”