From Russia With Fear

Fondly I remember a time when nobody would have given a damn about this play. Not so long ago, New York audiences would have greeted “Terrorism” as a glib view of a certain kind of violence. So the way we treat one another in our daily lives is not so different than the way fanatics try to blow up airports? Whatever you say, Presnyakov Brothers, whatever you say.The play wasn’t written to cash in on our post-September 11 anxieties. Even before that day, events in Russia provided all the raw material the playwriting brothers from Siberia needed. The fact that it has taken several years for the show to reach America seems like a stroke of good fortune for them – if not for us.I would much prefer to have been left cold by this play, to dismiss its frank violence and laissez-mourir comedy as an interesting bit of sociology, a window on Russia in the age of the Chechen wars. But in the era of the orange alert and the Patriot Act, “Terrorism” can’t be dismissed. To anyone who has lived in New York through these last few panicky years – and to a great many people besides, I would imagine – the play is profoundly unnerving. Like Caryl Churchill’s “Far Away,” it offers an eerily prescient view of life in the age of terror.The evening consists of six interconnected scenes, sometimes inscrutable vignettes that unfold like Hobbes’s idea of a farce. The stories are easy enough to summarize: A man tries to board his plane but is informed the airport is closed because of a bomb threat; a sexual liaison turns violent; old ladies trade ethnic fears and poison. But the real source of the play’s power remains ineffable. I know I found it creepy, but, try as I might, I can’t tell you exactly why.Is it the ideas propounded in the play, such as a stranded passenger’s horrifyingly sensible explanation for why terrorists want to kill civilians and not politicians: “Because no one and nothing can control a world in which ordinary people are killed that often, and in such large numbers. … It’s so simple to kill an idea, to assassinate the sense in things.” That is an apt and dismaying observation, one of many here.Is it director Will Frears’s production, which sometimes cuts against the text in surprising ways, as when a passenger informs a stranger, with perfect calm, that he is “boiling with rage inside”? Maybe it’s David Korins’s set, a series of concrete walls topped with razor wire that hang at odd angles around the stage. In this presentation, even the sense of confinement is slippery, ambiguous.Or is it some quality in the text itself? The Presnyakov Brothers try to extract comedy from subjects including midair disaster, kids with guns, chemical weapons, and sexual assault. The black humor is compounded by Sasha Dugdale’s translation, which was produced for a British audience at the Royal Court. For Americans, twice removed from the Presnyakovs’ original idioms, the sometimes deadened language adds to the disorientation.Though no names or places are ever spoken, the action seems foreign, yet its foreignness lends immediacy. The scenes are, in themselves, insubstantial, running only a few minutes each; but together they accumulate a queasy weight. Some scenes don’t come off and some moments misfire, but even in its wobbly fashion the play presents a grimly penetrating view of our imperiled time: It is the opposite of the polished, hollow “Pillowman.”For this trip into the timely and macabre, the New Group and the Play Company have assembled a first-rate group of performers. Nine actors play multiple roles through the evening, and most play them very well. (Many also get very nude – you’ve been warned.)The cast is led by the extraordinary Elizabeth Marvel, whom we may now declare, without fear of contradiction, is the most punk-rock actor in New York. She spends a scene here tied up in bed, naked from the waist down, and gagged. Ms. Marvel and her aggressive paramour, R.E. Rodgers (wearing a wedding band and nothing else), engage in the most explicit simulation of onstage sex this side of Amsterdam. There’s no flinching, no loss of concentration, no betrayal of character by either actor. And no sooner does the scene end than Ms. Marvel is back before us, dressed in drab office clothes, completely settled in an altogether different character. As she drew laugh after laugh as a clerk in a surreal office, it occurred to me that she possesses bravery to match her acting chops, which is saying something. It also reminded me to never, ever make her mad.Alex Draper and Darren Goldstein impress in a series of roles, and Lola Pashalinski and Laura Esterman enact a gruesome, funny scene about kids, racial purity, and poison. But Daniel Oreskes stands out, doing some of his best work in years. He underplays effectively as the stranded, raging passenger, and has a spooky, mesmerizing appeal as an army officer who preaches a bleak kind of reality to his charges. The playwrights flirt with self-criticism when Mr. Oreskes reflects on how talking about these subjects may give people ideas, may make matters worse. “It’s not about how many die in all this – the explosions, murders, terrorism. It’s about something else, way more frightening – this is the beginning of a chain reaction. Everyone, I mean everyone, is infected.”That appears to be the Presnyakov Brothers’ final message: that terrorism is not entirely a form of physical violence – the threat alone exacts a widespread mental toll. Created by outsiders and by ourselves, terror is not an act but a state of being, a condition of modern life. A bomb doesn’t have to explode to succeed, a character says. “In all of us here something has been broken, we’ve been made to think about something completely different. And what can we do about it?” The play offers no answers. In this, as in so much else, it seems an uncanny distillation of our time.Until June 26 (410 W. 42nd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, 212-279-4200).

From Russia With Fear

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