Theatre in Review: Tales from Red Vienna (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)Tales from Red Vienna certainly opens on an attention-getting note, with a wordless, anonymous, paid sexual encounter. Through a blue diaphanous curtain, we see a couple enter an apartment. She is in full mourning, her face obscured by a large hat and veil. He is in a three-piece suit. Without speaking, he lays down money, and, lifting her skirt, takes her, on the table, quickly and brutally. For him, the experience is obviously deeply erotic; for her, it clearly amounts to degradation. David Grimm's new play is set in Vienna in 1920, during its post-World War I political and economic hangover, and one of its fascinating revelations is that once-respectable women, having lost everything in the war, turned to prostitution, appearing on the streets at night in full mourning in order to protect their identities. That's how Heléna Altman gets by; her husband was killed in battle, and she has subsequently been reduced to living in a squalid apartment with Edda, her boozy, wisecracking maid. Even such everyday niceties as real coffee and whipped cream are beyond her reach, a fact that she laments as she anticipates a visit from her friend "Mutzi" von Fessendorf. The profoundly superficial Mutzi is married to a conservative diplomat ("that ham hock of a husband," comments Edda), and, being the kind of woman who is averse to death and poverty, has been avoiding Heléna for 18 months. She enters, trailing clouds of false sympathy and ersatz emotion. Her mood changes are total and instantaneous; dripping with disapproval, she brings news of another friend, who has been caught soliciting, resulting in her arrest and social ostracism. Just as this line of conversation is getting on Heléna's nerves, Mutzi, wreathed in Lady Bountiful smiles, announces that she has come to help; she has found a likely man for Heléna -- even, possibly, a marital prospect. Mutzi is no altruist. She wants the man, Béla Hoyos, for herself, and to preserve her reputation, she wants to set him up in a public relationship with Heléna. Lacking any reasonable alternatives, Heléna agrees to meet the man. When Béla appears, to her horror, he turns out to be the customer we saw in the opening scene. The livid Heléna wants nothing to do with him at first, but Béla pursues her relentlessly, even to the point of following her to her husband's grave to press his case. Because he is persistent and charming -- and because he has money to spend on her -- she soon falls for him, leaving Mutzi out in the cold. Mutzi is not the type to take this sort of thing lying down, however, and she soon returns with a bombshell announcement that I may not reveal. Let's just say that Heléna's past returns to make claims on her that she is no longer willing to honor. It seems clear that Grimm intended Tales from Red Vienna to be a mordant historical drama about a woman groping her way toward freedom against a background of political and social upheaval, but what he ended up with is something closer to one of Bette Davis' Warner Brothers vehicles or perhaps one of Marlene Dietrich's pre-code melodramas, such as Blonde Venus. (I can just imagine the poster copy: "She was torn -- between duty ... and DESIRE!") It doesn't help that Tales from Red Vienna never settles on a tone, jumping from sociopolitical drama in the early scenes to romantic comedy as Béla woos Heléna to historical sudser as she is forced to make some unpalatable choices. Watching Heléna fight her way through one plot twist after another, I began to wonder what attracted Grimm to this material and how he intended it to resonate for modern audiences. The director, Kate Whoriskey, keeps the action moving, even if she can't bind together the script's clashing tones into a unified point of view. Nina Arianda brings her usual formidable technique to bear on the role of Heléna, although, surprisingly, she never really makes a claim on our hearts. (The script is surprisingly silent about Heléna's current state of penury, having nothing to say about what happened to her family or that of her husband. ) Her performance is all about transformations as she changes from the hard-bitten survivor of the first act to the sexually and emotionally alive young woman of Act II to the deeply defeated creature of Act III. She has a palpable chemistry with Michael Esper's Béla, who positively radiates desire; he is especially good in Act III, when he is caught in a lie that significantly alters Heléna's view of him. Stealing scenes from Nina Arianda isn't easily done, but Tina Benko is an accomplished thief, and she dominates every scene she is in. Her Mutzi is a festival of grandly theatrical pronouncements, whether producing crocodile tears for Heléna, railing against the socialist government that dares to tax her, or dismissing the music of Mahler as "messy Judaic emotionalism." She's especially chilling when, noting that Heléna has held the moral high ground in their frirendship for far too long, she says, "I would like to look down at you for a change." As Edda, the maid, Kathleen Chalfant stumbles around the stage, half in the bag and cracking jokes that aren't often all that funny. (Catching Heléna and Béla in an embrace, she says, "Now you've given him a stiffy." This is about as amusing as Tales from Red Vienna gets.) If Tales from Red Vienna is a rickety vehicle, it enjoys first-class appointments. John Lee Beatty's set includes the genteel squalor of Heléna's apartment, a late-Victorian nightmare of clashing patterns, and an elaborately wrought cemetery, both of which are lit by Peter Kaczorowski with his typical sensitivity and attention to detail. Anita Yavich's costumes, including a gray bias-cut dress for Heléna and a stunning black-and-gold coat and hat for Mutzi, are some of the most sheerly beautiful designs I've seen all season. The sound design, by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, includes a number of scene-setting effects, including the arrival of a car and the sounds of the music students practicing on the floor above Heléna's apartment. For all of its assets -- a fascinating locale and time frame, a first-rate cast, a top-of-the-line design -- Tales from Red Vienna remains a faintly disappointing experience, a curiously old-fashioned piece of dramatic architecture that never seems to be speaking directly to an audience of 2014. At its best, it allows its fine actors a dramatic workout. But for a play about people being dragged into the modern world, kicking and screaming, it creaks like an old-fashioned star vehicle. -- David Barbour 
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