‘The Waves’ an impressive near miss
Virginia Woolf’s famed novel meets pandemic musings in Berkeley Rep digital project
Swept away by events beyond our control, most of us have spent the past year awash in feelings of grief and isolation. Even if you didn’t suffer a major loss due to the pandemic, you may well feel its ripples of alienation.
That’s why “The Waves in Quarantine” holds such allure now.
A fluid experiment at the boundary of theater and film, this daring Berkeley Repertory Theatre project tries to dive headlong into Virginia Woolf’s deep pool of existential dread, the terrible beauty of her insights into longing. Unfortunately, the hybrid piece just ends up skimming the surface of the languishing that has marked our lives oflate.
A digital interpretation of a 30-year-old adaptation by Lisa Peterson (director) and David Bucknam (composer) of Woolf’s avantgarde jewel, this disappointing new work unfolds in six short films that last about 90 minutes in total. Conceived by Peterson and Raul Esparza, “The Waves in Quarantine,” which Berkeley Rep is streaming for free, never makes you feel immersed in its impressionistic mysteries.
To be sure, it’s a brave attempt to capture the pulse of Woolf’s prose as well as the unsettling effect of making dramatic art via Zoom rooms. Directed by the Obie Awardwinning Peterson (“An Iliad”), the piece flips back and forth between the actors and their characters, often dwelling on the kind of idle chitchat you might hear in a theater’s green room.
Some of it’s intriguing but most of the self-referential dialogue feels like a meta-theatrical pose that undercuts our ability to connect to the narrative. Only rarely, such as in the sweeping majesty of the choral moments of the fifth short film, do we feel the echoes of yearning that make Woolf so endlessly moving.
Make no mistake, the cast is thoroughly watchable. Carmen Cusack (“Bright Star”) as Jinny, Tony winner Alice Ripley (“Next to Normal”) as Rhoda and Esparza (“Company,” TV’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”) as Bernard are all artists at the height of their powers, but the characters they play feel more sketched than fully inhabited. It’s as if we were peeking behind the scenes at a workshop presentation of a new work that has yet to meld its motifs with its music.
Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness distillation of six friends swimming through life, always achingly aware of their own looming mortality, only occasionally achieves the emotional depth it demands.
The first film squanders its sense of intrigue in digression. The third film, which explores the gender tropes Woolf famously upended, falls short of its promise. We hear about Woolf’s feminist legacy but we never feel its sparks burning in these women’s lives.
To be sure, Esparza has a truly compelling backstory with the piece. He was close with the show’s original composer, Bucknam, who died by suicide and never finished working on “The Waves.” But we never hear enough about the scope of the loss and the way it deepened Esparza’s connection to Woolf to suffuse this film with melancholy.
For the record, it’s the music (music and lyrics by Bucknam, with additional music and lyrics by Adam Gwon) that cuts the deepest here. The six-part harmonies and striking cinematography (Zelmira Gainza) of the fifth chapter, shot through with gorgeous shots of waves beating against the shore and snow wafting down on the city, strike at the core of Woolf’s wistfulness. The abstract poetry of those fleeting tableaux makes us long to plunge into the author’s universe with more profundity.