‘Phèdre’ hits scary heights of intensity in intimate space
Bold direction by Ariel Craft makes Cutting Ball production hit home
Incest, bloodshed and rumor might be the most notorious qualities of Jean Racine’s “Phèdre,” but what makes the 1677 tragedy almost unendurably intense are its arias of feeling. Debilitating self-loathing contends with irrepressible lust. Characters’ spectacular sense of entitlement and righteousness contrasts with woeful misreadings of relatives and beloveds, with cringeworthy displays of unmitigated id.
You should feel all that in any competent take on the play. Cutting Ball’s production, which opened Monday, April 24, ratchets up the play’s force still higher. Seated in the tiny Exit on Taylor, with just two rows of seats surrounding the playing space, you can see individual goose bumps sprout on an actor’s skin. You can observe a single downy arm hair glisten in its own coating of fake blood.
Rob Melrose’s new translation from the French finds off-kilter ways to make the lust of Queen Phèdre (Courtney Walsh) for her stepson Hippolytus (Ed Berkeley) feel still more verboten and layered. “The flames of hymen will never light for her,” goes one fiery line. “I can’t suffer a pleasure that mocks me,” goes another.
The real star of this show, however, isn’t the translation. Racine’s syntax is almost laughably complex, many sentences paragraphs in length, and only some cast members have the kind of expertise to distill complete clarity from these verbal labyrinths. Brennan PickmanThoon, as Hippolytus’ friend Theramene, is one. He delivers a monologue as if teaching a master class on its convoluted contents, but without a trace of pedantry. His character’s arguments and accounts land as if they’d been already lodged in your brain, needing only his perfectly calibrated spark to awaken from dormancy.
What sets Cutting Ball’s production apart is the direction of Ariel Craft. Under her leadership, even ensemble members with less developed instruments make such bold, crisp decisions about how to interpret the text that you keep investing in the conceit of scene and character even if particular bits of exposition — there was a war; hegemonies were challenged; threats were banished — don’t register.
A critic with an eye toward promoting the vivacity of small theater in the Bay Area might be loath to heap too much praise on Craft. Will she soon leave us for larger houses? We who are her immoderate fans might find some solace in that her stagings are perfectly suited to black box theaters. She choreographs a whole dance out of the way Hippolytus’ crush Aricia (Cecily Schmidt) and her servant Ismene (Maria Leigh, gamely subbing for Neiry Rojo, who had a family emergency opening weekend) lean back-to-back, then whirl to look face-to-face, then, tickles and tuggings behind them, slacken to look dreamily skyward, at the visage of the planet Neptune that lords over Nina Ball’s set design. Isn’t such a playful, intimate sequence, and how we all are more than bystanders to it, the very thing we attend small theater to feel?
If that’s not your black box theater jam, then surely it’s Walsh’s interpretation of the title role, one of the greatest parts ever written for women. Phèdre might be clad in 1950s attire worthy of Holly Golightly, but expect none of that character’s twee detachment. This woman’s first glimmers of longing are the shudders that herald seizures. Throughout the play, she renders her forbidden desire as if it’s its own being lodged in her hand and forearm, whose deviance she has to swat away or smother.
Those efforts are futile, of course. Cutting Ball’s “Phèdre” is manna for anyone who’s ever felt too much, whose desire overflowed long past the point where true feeling was cool or palatable.
This woman’s first glimmers of longing are the shudders that herald seizures.