Straining To Fit In

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The New York Sun

About 20 minutes into Julia Jordan’s new thriller, “Dark Yellow,” a mysterious drifter starts rattling on about a dream he has always held sacred. If only, he muses, everyone carried yellow umbrellas instead of black ones – “Imagine how pretty a rained out day could be!” This moment sounds the first of many artificial notes in the play: It’s a staggeringly inorganic bit of dialogue, and it shows the strain of Ms. Jordan’s writing, while reminding us of the other, better plays that she is taking as her template. And, worst of all, it makes her lead actor, the primal Elias Koteas, look like a guy who’s scared of the rain.

Studio Dante, Michael Imperioli’s ornate jewel box theater, loves the tension of putting diesel-fueled macho dramas on its gilt and brocaded stage. Mr. Imperioli and his coterie of collaborators have a stated preference for plays about tough guys with hearts of poets, and the lush surroundings only make their 5 o’clock shadows seem darker and more dangerous.

But Ms. Jordan’s ersatz attempt at bare-knuckles seems to have been written to order, nakedly obvious about its pretension to genre. And the 90-minute play drags with increasingly unbelievable chat that only really serves to keep the two characters on stage.

In a cornfield at night, a man frantically searches for a boy. Too afraid to go among the rows, he calls out to the child, luring him with the promise of safety. A muzzle flash puts paid to that idea, and the mystery of this boy’s death will lurk at the heart of every scene to come. Director Nick Sandow leaves the entire scene in the dark, letting his actors range about the audience. A child crying from immediately behind your chair packs a visceral punch – the last one of the night.

The rest of the drama takes place in a cramped living room (wedged in diagonally and sideways by set designer Victoria Imperioli), where a woman (Tina Benko) has just brought home a guy from a bar. The guy, Mr. Koteas, immediately looks like trouble – even in the watered down “Hot ‘n’ Throbbing” at Signature last season, he vibrated with sexual violence.

Their nervous courting takes the shape of a game. “Tell me something I don’t know,” Mr. Koteas flirts. The responses are ham-handed playwriting. Bits of trivia, packaged “fantasies” (like the umbrellas), and gabbled family histories sound nothing like what women and men actually say to each other. It is imitation “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” with a bit of misunderstood Mamet grafted on. Ms. Benko’s unnamed woman has clearly made an amateur study of popular baby names and scientific studies on motherhood, while Mr. Koteas’s drifter obsesses over color theory.That they continue to do this after Mr. Koteas has brandished a gun, an impotent member, and a gory jacket (not in that order), just makes it all more unbearably inane.

Through it all, we’re given plenty of time to admire the two actors.Trapped as they are, they still manage to find some nice moments of natural shyness. Ms. Benko doesn’t steer well at high speeds – as her hysteria level ratchets higher, so does her awkwardness. But Mr. Koteas, despite the indulgent hemming and hawing he borrows from his work in film, has enough intensity that we can forgive his clunking dialogue.

At least Studio Dante has succeeded in one of its missions: their pursuit of a non-theater-going audience. Introducing inexperienced audiences to off-Broadway can have its pitfalls – during a blackout, even the adults were saying “Ooh! Scary!” to one another – but it’s nice to see. Still, presenting “Dark Yellow” as a primary theater experience is problematic. There’s nothing like a grinding 90 minutes to jaundice a potential theater-goer for life.

Until June 17 (257 W. 29th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 212-868-4444).


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