‘Curious Incident’ a mind-opening play
Exhilarating production plugs audience into the thoughts of autistic teen
The flash of white light comes and goes so quickly that the audience may not quite believe their eyes. Did they, in that sudden illumination, just see the startling and alarming thing they thought they saw onstage?
With that opening visual gambit, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” rewires the conventional theatrical circuitry of a touring Broadway play. For the next 2½ hours, including an intermission, the audience doesn’t merely witness the jittery, high-voltage behavior of its protagonist, a 15-year-old boy with autism spectrum disorder. Rather, owing to a remarkable fusion of script, performance and design, they are fully embedded in the propulsive thoughts, intuitions, torments and hard-won human connections young Christopher Boone experiences.
As seen on Broadway, “Curious Incident” has the exhilarating and empathy-enlarging sense of one’s own synapses sped up and firing away in concert with those of a hypervigilant teen. It’s both an alien and immersively intimate experience.
Garlanded with honors, including seven Olivier Awards for its 2012 London premiere and a 2015 best play Tony Award for its Broadway engagement, England’s National Theatre production arrives at the Golden Gate Theatre on Tuesday, June 27. Performances continue through July 23.
Based on the 2003 novel by Mark Haddon, the play transforms the story of Christopher’s amateur sleuthing for the killer of a neighbor’s dog into a meta-theatrical conceit. In refashioning the novel’s
first-person narrative as the teen’s own playlike diary-within-the-play, Simon Stephens’ script becomes a dramatic combustion engine of insight and internal contradiction. It seems entirely fitting, for example, that Christopher expresses scorn for theatrical storytelling even as he’s doing and fully embodying just that.
For Stephens, action was the defining principle. In his page-to-stage transformation, he said by email, “I highlighted everything Christopher did rather than what he thought or felt or remembered. The dramatist deals only with behavior, and I needed to be alert to that.”
Haddon, a friend through their work at the National Theatre on different projects, called Stephens out of the blue and asked if he’d like to take on “Curious Incident.” Stephens reflected on the novelist’s offer, appending an ironically self-aware exclamation point: “I think he thought I had a flinty enough heart not to indulge any sentimentality in the book!”
For Stephens, Christopher is not an exemplar of autism or Asperger’s or another syndrome. “He’s just a boy with a particular brain. Like we all have.”
Playing him onstage is anything but routine. This is a huge part that demands exceptional verbal and physical stamina. When he’s not gushing out streams of language, the actor is literally bouncing off the bright blue walls of the box-like set.
Adam Langdon, a 24-year-old Juilliard graduate who is playing the lead role on tour, found the physical challenges the most daunting at first. Speaking by phone from Des Moines, Iowa, where the show was decamped for two weeks, he recalled an early rehearsal. “I remember having to kneel on top of two people’s shoulders and fall backwards. Back then I couldn’t see myself doing it. There are so many crazy things like that.”
Langdon tapped into the character to press forward. “Christopher finds that he is brave in the course of the play. He’s brave, so you have to be brave for him.”
The son of an actress mother and acting teacher father, Langdon grew up in New York and Vermont. He loved animals as a child and didn’t start acting himself until he
was 12. Then destiny took over.
At Juilliard, one of Langdon’s best friends was Alex Sharp, who played Christopher on Broadway. Langdon blew a first audition to replace him in the show, he said, then nailed the same material to get the part on tour. He regards “Sharpie,” as he calls his predecessor, a great friend and mentor who bought him beers when Langdon was underage and offered support about playing Christopher: “‘Call me anytime day or night,’ ” he said Sharp told him. “‘Or if you don’t want to talk to me at all, that’s fine, too.’ ” Langdon has checked in with his old friend from time to time.
“One of the main things I take from the play is that Christopher is a teenager,” said Langdon. “He gets annoyed with his dad and questions things and is learning about the world. At the end of the day he’s 15 years, three months and five days.
“He’d hate it if I didn’t say that,” Langdon added with a laugh about the character’s meticulous precision for all things numerical.
Precision is the hallmark of the show’s physical production, a kind of hyper-wired box chock full of kinetic lighting, projections, sound effects and fluidly sliding doors. “The space is designed to feel like we are inside Christopher’s brain,” said the show’s set designer, Bunny Christie, by email. “Sometimes when he is calm, the space is ordered and precise, straight lines and right angles. But at other times, as his anxiety increases, the space fizzes and crackles with electricity and it tilts out of control.”
After her early conversations with Stephens and “Curious Incident” director Marianne Elliott (“War Horse”), Christie considered a “poor theater” staging set in Christopher’s school. But when the new, more abstract concept emerged, the designer revisited Haddon’s novel for everything from illustrations that wound up in the projections to Christopher’s very specific descriptions of faces, clothes and a pair of shoes — New Balance trainers with red laces — worn by one of his neighbors.
Christie delved into computer games, nightclubs, high-tech architecture and mathematics exams for images and inspiration. Prime numbers, another Christopher fixation, also informed the design in ways that the audience discovers in multiple, beguiling ways.
While slightly less elaborate than the production seen in London and New York, the touring set is nonetheless “packed full of technology,” as Christie put it. The technical team and the performers, she continued, “collaborated more closely than I have ever experienced before.”
Such a connection is at the heart of the show’s ambition — to bundle together its multiple theatrical resources as tightly as possible and in doing so open up what Christie calls “Christopher’s universe. So that walking into the theater would feel like the Spaceship Curious had landed.”