Lurid scenes from a marriage
Amy Herzog’s “Belleville” is the kind of play that can go from a startlingly, painfully honest portrait of a contemporary affluent young couple to a bloodbath (and puke-bath) in a matter of seconds.
She captures with keen eye the way spouses, precisely because they’re spouses, can savage one another and then apologize sincerely, cast aspersions then lust violently for one another, all in the same instant. She gives such full breath to the banalities of married life of Abby (Alisha Ehrlich) and Zack ( Justin Gillman), American expats to Paris’ Belleville neighborhood, that in moments it’s
hard to believe that Custom Made Theatre Co.’s Bay Area Premiere production will be, as advertised, a thriller.
Yet just as you start to think that, dread creeps back in — the same dread that’s been apparent from the play’s first few lines, when Abby asks, a little too insistently, a little too anxiously, why Zack is home from work watching porn in the middle of the afternoon, and he in turn brushes off or shuts down every query with astonishing alacrity.
In Gillman’s astute rendering, Zack is a liar of unparalleled skill — which is to say a performer, charmer and improviser who’s able to compartmentalize and repress all niggling compunctions or anxieties. As an audience member, you might find yourself so drawn in to his consciousness that you, too, forget the disasters that threaten to upend his and Abby’s life — a life that includes a prestigious, noble job at Doctors Without Borders for him and an ornamental gig teaching yoga for her; charming Christmas gifts in boutique shopping bags; a Valium- and marijuana-fueled midday nap followed by a drunken night of debauchery, both decided spur of the moment, sans consequences.
Herzog supplies foils to Zack and Abby in their Senegalese Muslim landlords, Alioune (Nick Sweeney) and Amina (Nkechi Emeruwa). They live downstairs, and Alioune and Zack often smoke a bowl together, complaining about their wives. But any connection that creates is flimsy at best, as Herzog cannily illustrates in the way her white characters constantly cut off or don’t listen to the black ones. (If there’s any flaw in the writing of these early scenes, it’s that it’d be nice to hear more from Amina and Alioune.)
Yet Herzog’s writing and M. Graham Smith’s thoughtful direction never allow Abby and Zack to devolve into caricature. “No, yeah, it’s good, I’ll just set out to confirm every stereotype you may have about Americans,” Abby jokes wryly to Alioune in a halting exchange early in the play. As Abby careens between insensitivity and oversensitivity, Ehrlich adroitly makes clear that those two moods are two sides of the same coin.
In one moment you might loathe the childlike Abby and Zack for their privileges, their lack of responsibilities and their inability to cultivate mental health and marital bliss in spite of all that. But in the next, Herzog might allow Zack to be the perfect husband in the way he cares for a stubbed toe or a hangover, or Smith might create a moment of such striking naturalism that you’d swear you were overhearing neighbors intone sweet nothings rather than watching a staged scene.
Toward the end of the play, improbabilities mount so quickly, and the characters get so little time to absorb each bit of earth-shattering news, that the heretofore steadily building tension dissipates rather than climaxes. Abby’s reactions, in particular, seem out of character. For a woman who early in the play zeroes in on each observed inconsistency with laser-sharp focus, peppering Zack with questions with the logic and relentlessness of a litigator, half-thoughtthrough, restrained replies don’t feel justified.
Still, “Belleville” makes a harrowing point about just how deeply statusconsciousness in grains itself, how much privilege warps perception — and that those insidious forces don’t just influence cartoons, stereotypical elites, but people who might look and talk just like you.