Theatre in Review: The Meeting: The Interpreter (Theatre at St. Clement's)

	Kelley Curran, Frank Wood. Photo: Carol Rosegg

The Meeting: The Interpreter begins with a full set of film-style credits delivered on a screen that blocks our view of the stage. Well, we can't say we weren't warned. The screen, which, eventually, shuffles to the far left, never disappears, remaining a permanently scene-stealing presence; it remains a key aspect of a production so chockful of technology and staging devices that it teeters on the edge of incoherence throughout.

Even as the 2024 presidential campaign slips into high gear, Catherine Gropper's play looks back at the 2016 contest, most notably the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer and possible government agent, and Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and several others. Ostensibly set up with the promise of delivering some of those notoriously missing Hillary Clinton emails, it seemingly led nowhere but it planted in the public consciousness evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As is typical of everything touched by Trump, it managed to be both murky and tawdry, its tentacles taking in everything from the martyred Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to the Miss Universe Pageant. Even now, what happened is unclear, since everyone involved kept changing their stories.

Gropper focuses on the title character, a regular associate of Veselnitskaya, who facilitated the conversation that day, later coming under considerable legal scrutiny as different investigative bodies tried to get at the truth. His name is redacted from the script, and we've been asked not to mention it, although it is easily available online. This may be partly due to the playwright's desire to protect his privacy. It may help explain why The Meeting: The Interpreter is so fancied up with theatrical gimmicks that it is often hard to follow. It's a study of ambiguity that becomes a master class in obfuscation.

The action begins with Frank Wood, who plays The Interpreter, and Kelley Curran, seen on screen at a Senate hearing; he is there to testify, and she plays the battery of lawyers interrogating him. For a few minutes, it looks like the entire play will unfold on video; finally, the actors are revealed, facing upstage, looking into a camera lens. In Jim Findlay's scenic design, the playing area is surrounded by circular tracks, allowing a camera crew to shoot the live video feed that, with its dramatic close-ups, takes up so much of our attention.

The opening scene and another, set in the House of Representatives, are brief dramatic episodes weighed down by tons of exposition, which Curran races through, clearly not intending for us to comprehend. (At the performance I attended her speed-reading skills got a hand from the audience.) The actors click their fingers to suggest the passage of time. Curran drums a tattoo on the table whenever The Interpreter's name is supposed to be mentioned; an accompanying video image notes that it is redacted. The actors wander offstage to a dressing room area for a surprisingly long time; captured by the camera, they adjust their costumes and makeup. Curran wears several ties, flipping them around to indicate different Congressional questioners; it's a wasted effort since it is impossible to tell who is speaking anyway. There's also an upstage booth, like those featured in old television game shows such as The $64,000 Question, to which the actors sometimes repair.

And so it goes: A set of indistinguishable puppets, designed by Julian Crouch, represents the participants in the Trump Tower meeting. Curran and Wood speak over each other, bat around a folder of incriminating evidence, fight over a naked puppet representing Magnitsky, and perform a dance sequence choreographed by Orlando Pabotoy. At one point, Wood lies down on the stage and plays with a bucket of sand. It's the full Wooster Group treatment -- focused on narrative method rather than content -- but lacking in that troupe's precision and eye for detail. These touches, combined with a fractured time frame and a text that never provides clear direction, ensure that The Meeting: The Interpreter all but evaporates in clouds of confusion.

Gropper would do well to remember that the Trump Tower meeting was about two dozen Trump scandals ago and the details may not be fresh in our minds. Indeed, she evinces little interest in dramatizing the episode. The Interpreter remains a cipher and Veselnitskaya's motivations are left vague. Did she dangle the possibility of Hillary dirt? Was she really focused on support for Russian adoptions and The Magnitsky Act, which facilitates sanctions on human rights offenders? Or did she give Trump (or his aides) a file filled with allegedly incriminating information? As the script notes, even Steve Bannon said, "The chances that Don Jr. did not walk your group up to his father's office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero." Then again, do you trust Steve Bannon?

Watching the actors fight through a battery of staging bits, it seems clear that, somewhere along the way, director Brian Mertes lost control of his production. Wood, a longtime specialist in little gray men, is both enigmatic and riddled with low-level anxiety, quietly insisting that his loyalties lie with the US, not the country of his birth, yet vanishing into silence when faced with a direct question. Curran deftly swaps out characters although, adopting a Russian accent for Veselnitskaya, she is often hard to understand. (The actors are sometimes obviously miked, sometimes not.) Both actors are hamstrung by a script that never clarifies the dynamic between The Interpreter and his old friend and employer.

At times, the production nearly buckles under the weight of its design, thanks to Yana Biryukova's pristine, eye-grabbing imagery, which often overshadows the actors, and the distracting underscoring provided by Daniel Baker & Co. Rather better are Barbara Samuels' varied lighting and Olivera Gajic's costumes.

Still, it's rare to see a play so blatantly in conflict with itself, which so consistently mutes the impact of the story it ostensibly wants to tell. A coda informs us that The Interpreter now teaches at NYU and continues to work for high-level government officials. That tells you something about him -- more, in fact, than anything found onstage at Theatre at St. Clement's. --David Barbour