HORTON FOOTE'S THE OLD FRIENDS AT THE SIGNATURE

     I am ashamed to say that until last night I had never seen a Horton Foote play. Some years ago I read his Pulitzer Prize winning work, THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA. Being ignorant of the complex backstories of the characters who had appeared in other Foote plays, I was disturbed by what seemed to be a defense of the provincial homophobia of the characters. I decided it is time to give his highly celebrated work another try. Foote, who died in 2009, had a career that spanned over 65 years. He wrote successfully for film, television and the stage. Most of his stage work takes place in a small, fictional Texas town. He is a master of domestic realism. His plays don't have the metaphysical element one finds in Edward Albee's work or the poetry of the outsider one finds in the plays of Tennessee Williams. Nonetheless, his dialogue is beautiful to hear, his narratives well crafted and his characters fully drawn. Like Chekhov, Foote is interested in characters trapped in a provincial society. Like Chekhov, his tactic of  getting his exposition out of the way at the outset is not totally convincing, but once past that. his plays are absorbing and wonderful vehicles for good acting.
     THE OLD FRIENDS, now having its premiere run at the wonderful Signature Theatre, has had a long history. First drafted in the mid-1960s as a sequel to a play he wrote in the mid-1940s, it received a staged reading in 1982 and a reading at the Signature in 2002 but for some reason was never given a full production. After the Signature reading, Foote embarked on revisions, but the play was never produced in his lifetime (he died in 2009). After seeing this brilliantly acted production, one wonders why the play took so long to get to the stage. THE OLD FRIENDS is a tense family melodrama. It might remind you of Lillian Hellman's THE LITTLE FOXES, though it is better written and less overtly melodramatic -- here, as in Chekhov, guns go off but no one is killed. Its brilliant characterizations of Southern women on the verge of nervous breakdowns might remind you of Tennessee Williams, but without the Gothic elements. The nastiness might recall Edward Albee's work (this was first written about the time of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF), but without the despair.
     THE OLD FRIENDS is an ironic title for a play about a group of small town folk who despise each other but can't seem to live apart. The play centers on three different but powerful women. Two of them, Julia (Veanne Cox) and Gertrude (Betty Buckley) see themselves as the wealthiest, most powerful women in their small town. Neither is happy. Julia and her husband Albert have a long, unhappy, childless marriage (the wealthy women in this town either aren't very fertile or didn't have much of a sexual relationship with their husbands). Albert won't speak to Julia's mother, who lives with them (did she engineer this unhappy marriage). Julia drinks to tolerate her husband, who spends most of the play drunk, her mother, and her supposed friends. Gertrude, an alcoholic, just lost her husband but hardly seems grief stricken. Most of her energy is spent clinging to her husband's younger brother, Howard (Cotter Smith), the real love of her life who has devoted himself to managing Gertrude's property holdings. In her relatively sober moments, Gertrude ruthlessly wields power to control the people around her:, particularly Howard: her alcoholic moments lead to violent, destructive tantrums. Enter Sybil (Hallie Foote), Julia's recently widowed sister-in-law, who has returned home after thirty years away. Sybil's husband, Julia's brother, was an oil speculator who lost everything. Sybil is dirt poor, but she has a quiet strength the other women lack. Sybil's re-entry into Harrison "society" is the catalyst for violent strains on the tenuous relationships of these unhappy characters.
     Foote is fascinated by the ways in which materialism has corrupted the lives of these people. Their wealth and possessions don't make them happy. Indeed their dependence on things and their use of other people have poisoned their lives. Only Sybil with her books and her sense of self, Howard (who like a Chekhov character just wants to get back to the land and the simple life) and matriarch Mamie (Lois Smith) seem content, but can they live in this town without desperate Gertrude and Julia invading and literally trashing their homes and their lives?
     THE OLD FRIENDS is a entertaining, troubling and totally absorbing play. Foote is not only a great craftsman; he writes dialogue that is a joy to hear. The play has been given a perfect production under the direction of Foote's longtime collaborator, Michael Wilson. What can one say about this starry cast? Betty Buckley gives a bravura performance as the monstrous Gertrude. Why has no one revived SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH for her? No one plays a poisonous grande dame better than Buckley. Hallie Foote provides a perfect contrast. Watch her quietly watching the excesses of the women she despises. She doesn't have to speak to dominate the stage. Veanne Cox captures Julia's battle against age and boredom and Lois Smith is delightful as the sweet but tough matriarch absorbing the cruelty of her daughter and son-in-law and finding joy in a simpler life. Only one male character is pivotal -- Howard, whom Gertrude fights to possess but who has always loved Sybil, who just wants to    farm on his own. Cotter Smith gives Howard a good deal of dignity, but enough tentativeness to make us wonder if he has the resolve to follow his dream.
     Brilliant acting of an excellent script. What more can one ask? And for $25!!
      By the way, if you haven't been to the Pershing Square Signature Center, you are missing the most pleasant theatrical experience in New York City. This impressive new center, designed by Frank Gehry, has four comfortable, intimate theaters and a commodious lobby area with a nice bookshop and an excellent bar cafe with good, reasonably priced food and drink. There's usually live music in the lobby area before the performances. The Signature produces old and new work by established American playwrights. Its fare is less experimental than Playwrights Horizons, a block east on 42nd Street, which focuses on new work. Like its neighbor, the Signature attracts the best actors, directors and designers. Both theatres have friendly, young front of house workers who help make the theatergoing experience pleasant. What a contrast to the overpriced, uncomfortable Broadway houses.
THE OLD FRIENDS. Signature Theatre. September 1, 2013.

Anne Washburn's MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY at Playwrights Horizons

     OK, here's a generalization -- there's a basic problem with plays built on concepts rather than characters and narrative. Given that there is no particular reason to care about the people on stage beyond their role as carriers of the play's idea or gimmick, the play can become tiresome once we "get" what's going on. Everything depends on the execution, which has to be constantly interesting and surprising. Regina Taylor's stop.reset., reviewed in my last entry, balanced a challenging, important question about the clash between past and present modes of transmission of information and memories with interesting characters. The same cannot be said of Anne Washburn's clever but only fitfully absorbing MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY, which went on far too long for its content.
      The play begins with five people sitting around a fire recounting at great length an episode of THE SIMPSONS. Now I have only watched THE SIMPSONS a few times in my life, so watching this scene go on and on reminded me of being at a party from hell where stoned people try to recount at great length a movie or tv episode you haven't seen or tell the same joke over and over. TIme seems to stop. About ten minutes into this, you realize that one guy is armed and guarding this small encampment. Another person enters and the drama comes to life. We discover that there has been a series of meltdowns of nuclear power plants that have caused massive radioactive poisoning and a total loss of electric power. Washburn wisely gives only sketchy exposition: this is, after all, familiar disaster movie territory. In this new wasteland, people try to discover who might still be alive. They also try to keep a semblance of culture going by piecing together their memories of episodes of THE SIMPSONS and movies like CAPE FEAR and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. The newcomer can only sing bits of Gilbert and Sullivan, but his impromptu recital is appreciated by the others. In a post-electric world, any form of entertainment is welcome.
     The second scene takes place seven years later. The group we met in the first scene seem to have become a sort of theatre troupe rehearsing bits of sitcoms (THE SIMPSONS, of course), medleys of past top 40 hits and "commercials" that offer a nostalgic picture of the past when there were hot baths and chilled chablis. In this new world, one has to pay (with what currency?) for others' memories of moments from sitcoms. There also seems to be a rivalry between performing troupes that can lead to violence. Of course, performances have to take place in the daytime when there is light. So the insatiable hunger for entertainment has survived in a bizarre form in post-electric America.
      In the final scene, we are seventy-five years farther into the future where a troupe is presenting a musical made up of bits of THE SIMPSONS episode that was previously recounted. Original music has been mixed with bits of Gilbert and Sullivan. By this time, this collage of memories of past entertainment have been remolded into a new work of art.\ with fairly elaborate scenery. This verse drama with songs turns THE SIMPSONS into a recounting of the past disaster and an artistic embodiment of the terror of living in this new radioactive world. Mr. Burns, the sometimes sinister SIMPSONS character becomes the embodiment of all the terrors of living in this new society. Yet at its finale, this musical becomes an unintentional parody of the traditional Broadway musical's expression of optimism and self-assertion and ends with a patriotic hymn to the music of Arthur Sullivan. Popular art survives, but hasn't changed much.
      The show only came to life in the musical moments, particularly the Top 40 medley in the second scene. The musical that filled the final scene went on too long and the music (Michael Friedman) was more awful than the worst Broadway score (well, maybe not as bad as the score for ONCE). Perhaps its eerie tunelessness was intentional, but if so the joke wore very thin over half and hour.
      Throughout the cast did what it had to do well enough, but since they had no characters to play, they seemed somewhat adrift. Steve Cosson's direction seems listless.
       MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY offers a celebration of the human need to make theatre even in a terrible world, yet the theatre that is created is still dependent on conventions of television and the commercial theatre. THE SIMPSONS moves from memory to nostalgia to the basis for a work of art that says something about the past and present of the people performing it and watching it. However, since the creators of MR. BURNS seem to feel superior to the conventions of the Broadway musical, they offer a dark vision of the future of human existence and of art in a post-electric world.
      Yes, MR BURNS is clever, but it is far too long. Maybe it will get more of a sense of pace (this was an early preview), but the script is in desperate need of editing. I can't help thinking it would be better if it were the length of a SIMPSONS episode. I kept wanting to scream, "I get it. Move on already!"
MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY. Playwrights Horizons. August 31, 2013.

stop.reset. by Regina Taylor at the Signature Theatre

     It is always wonderful to go to the theater an be pleasantly surprised. I don't mean surprised because a play is better than one expected it to be: I mean surprised because the play took you on an unexpected, thrilling journey. Such was the experience of seeing Regina Taylor's production of her challenging play, stop.reset. at the Signature last night. From what I read, I expected a realistic play about the head of an African-American publishing house facing the brutal challenges of selling books in the age of the internet. Indeed this is the conventional, realistic part of the story. Alexander Ames, founder of the publishing house, came up from nothing. For a while, he presided over the first and
most successful Black owned publishing business, housed in its own impressive Chicago building. Now the business is foundering. There has been a merger and the new owners demand a turnaround of the business or else liquidation. Part of that turnaround will require downsizing of an already reduced staff. Yet Ames, whose beloved son was murdered and who has suffered a mild stroke, seems more concerned with his crossword puzzle than his business. One by one, he interviews his remaining staff to try to decide who can stay. While Ames seems rooted in his racial, familial and professional past and in his love for books, which are mementos of the past, his staff is very much in the present, concerned about keeping their jobs. They swear loyalty, but betray each other when Ames asks them who should go and who should stay. Each person presents a racial-ethnic-gendered point of view. The Asian-American woman hints at sexual favors if she is kept -- the price women sometimes have to play in the marketplace; the white man plays the race card; the younger Black man has been cozying up to the new owners; and the middle-aged Black woman, taking servility to an extreme, gets hypothermia trying to get coffee for the boss in a blizzard. Ames's interviews with these people are dramatically fascinating if conventional. BUT -- and this is a big BUT -- his key antagonist is not one of his staff. It's a nineteen-year-old janitor (is he really a janitor?) constantly talking on his Bluetooth device -- to whom? J. (no name), is a young, multi-ethnic, perhaps metrosexual young man for whom cyberspace is a kind of religion. Unlike the hyper-articulate authors Ames reveres, J. is semi-literate (who needs to read now?) but a kind of author, reaching constantly to his invisible audience offering updates. He speaks in tweets. He is also involved in some sort of elaborate cyber game in which the only currency is points. Unlike Ames, J. has no meaningful past and seems indifferent to the past. With J's entry into Ames's office, and Ames's fascination with this strange quasi-mystical kid, stop.reset. merges realism and science fiction in fascinating ways. Ultimately the play is about the power of memory and the ways in which memories have been transmitted and the ways in which they link people culturally. Ames is crippled by being all memory. J has none until there is a kind of mind meld at the end of the play.
     I don't want to give too much away, but I can't recommend this play highly enough. It's purposely baffling at times -- perhaps constantly baffling to audience members with no knowledge of science fiction. It is also constantly absorbing -- even exciting. Alexander Ames, Taylor's central character, loves Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN, one of the classic American novels and one that moves from realism to surrealism. Taylor, too, has been influenced by Ellison. J is a kind of Invisible Man for our century. The final image of stop.reset. is an echo of Ellison's epic novel in which one must destroy the scraps of paper that seem to hold one's identity. Regina Taylor has written a fascinating script. She has also created an excellent production, from the constantly changing projections to the realistic interactions of characters, to the play's believable move into strange, gripping new territory. Her cast couldn't be better. The wonderful Carl Lumbly brings to life all the contradictions of Alexander Ames. The young Ismael Cruz Cordova, a star in the making, is riveting as the young prophet of the world of the disconnected mind.  Ames' staff -- played by Michi Barrall, Teagle F. Bougere, Latanya Richardson Jackson and Donald Sage Mackay, all familiar from roles on stage and television -- are all convincing and credibly make the change from realistic to surreal in the last moments of the play.
     stop.reset. deserves to reach a younger audience than the middle-aged to elderly audience at the Signature on Friday night. It's only $25 dollars -- a cheap night on the town.
     I place it in the "Must See' category. I'm going again if I can.
stop.reset. Signature Theatre. August 30, 2013.

Sondheim's MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG in London

     Sondheim fans know the checkered history of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. It was given a disastrous production by Harold Prince in 1981 after which Sondheim and Prince parted ways until Prince created a pretty awful production of WISE GUYS two decades later. George Furth's book, like the George S. Kaufman play on which it is based, goes backward in time, taking the characters from forty to twenty. Prince's idea was to have young unknown performers play the characters with the action as a flashback from the central character, Franklin Shepard, speaking at a graduation of his high school over two decades after he graduated. The high school kids suddenly became the characters in Shepard's story. None of it worked. A few years later, Sondheim and James Lapine revised the show for a production at the La Jolla Playhouse. There and for most productions since, the characters have been played by actors closer to the age of the characters at the end of their story (the beginning of the show) and the opening scene at the high school graduation has been scrapped. Over the years Sondheim has made other revisions in the score and some changes have been made to the book by Furth, Lapine and others.
     The recent London production, first presented at the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory, but then transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre, has a few new moments, one of which is misjudged. Maria Friedman has staged the show simply and deftly on a unit set. There's a good small band in the pit -- all brass and winds as in the original production. The cast is a mixed bag. Gavin Umbers is fine as Franklin Shepard. Like Bobby in COMPANY (same book writer, George Furth), Frank is a bit of a cipher. He exists mostly in his friends' definitions of him. We're told he's a great composer, though the few examples of songs he has written don't seem that good -- the rest of the score is better. We're told that by becoming a Hollywood producer he has totally sold out artistically and spiritually. Gavin Umbers made as much of his character as one can make. He didn't work the magic on the weakly written character that Rupert Young worked on COMPANY's Bobby a couple of years ago, but one could see Frank's sense of his own emptiness. The judgments of Frank are mostly made by his two best friends, lyricist Charlie Kringas (Damian Humbly) and lovelorn dipsomaniac, Mary Flynn (Jenna Russell). In previous productions, Charlie usually steals the show, but Humbly was merely dull in the part. He came to life for his big number, Franklin Shepard Inc., but mostly seemed to be a judgmental bore. Mary is a tricky part. Why is she part of this menage? Charlie marries her roommate, but Mary remains a  crucial part of the Franklin-Charlie-Mary threesome. Of course, one of the points of the musical is that friendship is greatly nostalgia for the youthful moment when these people became friends, but has little grounding in the present. Mary and Charlie love Frank, but they don't like him. On the night I saw the show, Russell overacted a bit. Over the years, the role of Frank's second wife, musical comedy star Gussie Carnegie, has grown. Now she has a big second act opening number, supposedly the Broadway hit Frank and Charlie have written for her. The song is almost a parody of a bad, generic 1950s musical production number, more Hollywood than Broadway. If this is the sort of thing Frank Shepard wrote, he was wise to become a producer.
     All of which is to say that there are some wonderful numbers in MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, but the show still doesn't quite work and not all the many revisions made over the years are improvements. This production has been enthusiastically hailed by the London critics and was cheered by a full house the night I saw it. I was certainly glad to see it. The last scene which takes place as the young Frank, Charlie and Mary watch Sputnick soar over their New York City rooftop, is still one of them most moving moments in musical theatre. However, even the genius Sondheim can't fully bring these characters to life.
MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Harold Pinter Theatre. June 25, 2013.

Lucy Kirkwood's CHIMERICA at the Almeida Theatre, London

     In Beijing in 1989 Joe, a teenage freelance photographer, manages to snap a photo from a window above Tiananmen Square that becomes for the U.S. the iconic image of resistance -- a young man carrying two shopping bags defiantly stands in front of a tank. Here is an image of a classic American myth, the individual pitted heroically against the forces of oppression. But it that really what the picture depicts? Over twenty years later, the photographer, back in a now much-changed Beijing, hears that the "Tank Man" is still alive and becomes obsessed with finding him. In the process he rides roughshod over the lives of several innocent people. Joe is the Ugly American, ignorant of the very different mores of another culture -- China's. He is also a photographer who believes that pictures can change lives. However, the story behind "Tank Man" is very different from the one he wants to impose on it and the real hero may have been in the tank, not standing in front of it. Joe's Chinese friend who starts him on his obsessive hunt for tank man, turns out to have been a major character in the story behind the picture.
     Lucy Kirkwood's CHIMERICA is a fascinating, complex story about reading and misreading a picture that, by the end of the play, is nothing more than an investment for a young Chinese entrepreneur who was not yet born at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre of student protesters. It might be more effective if it were a bit shorter (it is over three hours long), but it is constantly absorbing. It's a big play -- over twenty characters in dozens of short scenes. At times I wondered if Kirkwood had originally written it as a screenplay. Nonetheless, it really comes alive on stage.
     I have reservations about Lyndsey Turner's production with its constantly revolving stage -- at least five minutes could be cut from the play by eliminating all the revolving from one scene to another. Like long blackouts in film, the revolve slowed down the pace of the narrative. More important, the production lacked a necessary sense of time and place. The play moves from 1989 to the present and across America during the 2012 presidential campaign, yet the production didn't specify where a scene was taking place. I would have preferred a speedier, simpler production. The large cast was excellent. Stephen Campbell Moore seems to specialize in playing nice looking men who are morally ambiguous. He has to carry much of this play and he does it effectively. Benedict Wong is touching as his heroic Chinese friend. Claudie Blakley, who is always good, brings out both the toughness and vulnerability of Tessa, a market researcher who learns hat there is such a thing as an individual and that Americans can't begin to understand China.
     Yes, we're back to the mysterious East, but Kirkwood wants to draw the parallels between two very different cultures. CHIMERICA was one of very few new plays running in London this summer. It does what a good play should do -- it challenges our perceptions of appearances and our stereotypes of human behavior.  
CHIMERICA by Lucy Kirkwood. Almeida Theatre, London. June 26, 2013.

Eugene O'Neill's STRANGE INTERLUDE at the National Theatre, London

     Alan Downer, my drama lit professor in college had a favorite aphorism for bloated, intellectual empty drama, "The elephant labored and brought forth a mouse." I could hear Downer saying this this while watching the National Theatre of Great Britain's expensive revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1924 drama, STRANGE INTERLUDE. Though the play was well staged, beautifully designed and well acted save for one awful casting mistake, my general reaction was "Why bother." To some extent that is often my response to O'Neill revivals.
     Historically Eugene O'Neill was of great importance to the history of American drama, which was for the most part frivolous and formulaic before he came on the scene. He imported European techniques such as expressionism and was a restless experimenter. Unfortunately, he also wrote terribly clunky dialogue and his characters are more often ideas than simulacra of complex human beings. For the most part, his work is so solemn that audience now find it funny. STRANGE INTERLUDE is a prime example of what is wrong with O'Neill's work. Over almost five hours we watch our central character Nina draw men to herself in an effort to find happiness, but happiness is always an impossibility in O'Neill's work. Devastated by the wartime death of her fiancé, Gordon, who was an ideal of masculinity (smart, athletic, heroic, handsome), she moves back into her intellectual father's home until she realizes that she has to find some meaning for her life through service. She becomes a nurse to war veterans, but is impelled to offer them non-medical solace. She attracts two very different men: Charles Marsden, an older classic Mama's boy who is repulsed by sex, and Ned Darrell, a handsome medical researcher. Neither of them want marriage, so they push Nina into a marriage with Sam Evans, a nice guy who is anything but intellectual. Sam worshipped Gordon and is thrilled to catch his former girlfriend. From this point, the play descends into Freudian soap opera. Nina, pregnant with Sam's child discovers from Sam's mother that there is a strain of hereditary insanity in the family and that Nina should abort the child. Mrs. Evans also advises Nina to become impregnated by another man so she and Sam can have a happy child. I doubt if THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS ever came up with a scene as silly as this one. Nina, of course follows Mrs. Evans advice and has a child by the handsome scientist, Ned Darrell, who falls in love with her. Of course she and Sam name the child Gordon after that dead ideal of manhood. All this and we're only a third of the way into the play. For the rest of its Wagnerian length (cut by an hour in this production), we follow Nina's relationships with the many men in her life, all of whom are her satellites and acolytes.
     O'Neill's new technique in STRANGE INTERLUDE was to have the characters voice their thoughts as well as their dialogue. In other words, they speak their subtext. Since nothing very subtle is going on, the actors are constantly stating the obvious. More than anything else, this and the silly, portentous utterances ("Yes our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father!") account for the laughter the play now elicits. There are no characters in STRANGE INTERLUDE. Like a medieval allegory we have cardboard personifications: Mama's boy, cold scientist, all-American boy. Since Nina only gains any identity through these cardboard men, she is not a very interesting character. And the whole thing is so humorless and repetitive that it is funny. O'Neill must have had a very low opinion of his audience to feel he had to restate the obvious. Nineteenth-century French hack playwright Auguste Scribe told his proteges that important ideas should be repeated three times to make sure the audience got them: O'Neill seemed to believe repeating them thirty times would be more effective.
     The National Theatre spend a lot of money on this hollow, pretentious play. The audience applauded the grand, revolving sets more than the actors. Nina's costumes were lovely. Director Simon Godwin took a grand opera approach that only made the play seem more hollow. The actors tried their best. The wonderful Anne-Marie Duff did all she could to make Nina a character. Charles Edwards and American actor Darren Pettie, actors I have admired in other roles (Pettie most recently in the superb DETROIT at Playwrights Horizons), seemed at sea here, but what can you do with that awful dialogue? Pettie acted like he thought his lines were as silly as we in the audience did. Jason Watkins, who can only play creepy, was woefully miscast as the supposedly normal (though carrying crazy genes) Sam Evans. Sam is supposedly to be a great success in advertising, but Watkins made him infantile.
     Critics who admire O'Neill more than I have explained the audience's laughter at this revival and a recent one at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington by claiming that contemporary audiences have found a rich, dark comedy in STRANGE INTERLUDE. I think we laugh because it is an overwrought play that has long passed its sell by date. We are laughing at the play, not with it.  
STRANGE INTERLUDE. Royal National Theatre Lyttleton Theatre. July 4, 2013.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME - National Theatre production at the Apollo Theatre

     Mark Haddon's novel, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME is a fascinating mix. Fifteen year old Christopher is writing a memoir in the form of an Arthur Conan Doyle detective novel. He becomes a young Sherlock Holmes trying to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog. In the process he uncovers the disintegration of his own family. Sherlock Holmes has his problems dealing with ordinary society, particularly in the contemporary versions with actors Benedict Cumberpatch and Jonny Lee Miller. Christopher has an extreme form of Asberger's syndrome. He can't be touched without screaming or hitting. He also can't tell a lie in a world in which he is surrounded by dishonesty. It's a lovely novel, both deeply sad and inspiring. But how do you adapt for the stage a novel narrating by an autistic teenager? Somehow Simon Stephens, director Marianne Elliott and their colleagues have turned Haddon's book into an even more surprising, exciting and moving theatre work.
     Bunny Christie's set at first seems simple -- a giant box, but by magic and the superb video projections created by Finn Ross, the box shows us the world as Christopher experiences it. The staging, more like choreography has a group of actors who alternately menace and liberate Christopher, at one point lifting him so that he literally walks the walls. Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett of Frantic Assembly have created a kind of ballet as Christopher journeys to solve his mystery and to find a safe place for himself. It's all theatre magic of the highest order.
       I can't praise the cast highly enough. Johnny Gibbon (who alternates with Luke Treadaway) captures Christopher's vulnerability and his strength. Sean Gleeson shows how Christopher's father's awful mistakes are really expressions of his abiding love for his son.
       Read the book, but also see the play. I can only hope it comes to the US.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME adapted from Mark Haddon's novel by Simon Stephens. Apollo Theatre, London. July 2, 2013.