Theatre in Review: The Moors (The Playwrights Realm/The Duke on 42nd Street)

	Linda Powell. Photo: Joe Chea

The characters in Jen Silverman's new play, inhabitants of a mansion in a bleak corner of England, often wander off onto the surrounding moors, all but vanishing into the fog that appears to be a permanent fixture of life there. Watching them, I often felt lost in a fog, myself. Silverman has staked out for herself the literary territory first explored by the Brontë sisters and later cultivated by the likes of Daphne du Maurier and a thousand authors of Harlequin Romances -- subjecting it to a kind of postmodern analysis that is as labored as it is obvious.

Dane Laffrey's striking set provides the tipoff that this is not going to be a conventional tale of romance and intrigue. Instead of the elaborate trappings of a nineteenth-century mansion, the designer places a handful of vintage furniture pieces -- a sideboard, a couple of carved wood chairs, a rather large bone -- on what appears to be a field of black Astroturf; there is no masking, leaving the lighting rig exposed. The first few minutes provide further clarification, for as soon as Emilie, the heroine, arrives, the air is filled with strange portents. Emilie has been engaged by Branwell, the master of the house, as governess for his two children; she is already a little bit in love with Branwell, thanks to their correspondence, but neither he nor her young charges are evident.

Instead, Emilie encounters Branwell's two sisters, the weak, childlike Huldey and the steely, controlling Agatha. There are other bizarre touches: Every room in the house looks exactly alike. One servant assumes two identities, the parlor maid and her twin in the scullery. (This is not a case of double-casting. At one point, Emilie asks, "Are your Marjory or Mallory right now?" "I'm in the scullery, so I'm the scullery maid," comes the reply.) One maid -- don't ask me which -- is pregnant, and the other has typhus and is given to elaborate coughing fits -- a gag that isn't funny the first time and doesn't improve with repetition.

What follows is a three-decker plot filled with classic Victorian-era hysteria, closeted lesbian romance, and the interspecies pursuit of love, ending in a demonstration of nature red in tooth and claw. Emilie learns that she has been summoned by Agatha, who plans to use her to repopulate the family. The tremulous Huldey, who pours all her emotion into her diary, contemplates murdering Agatha. (She is egged on in this by Marjory/Mallory.) Meanwhile, the family dog, known as Mastiff, finds an ailing bird, Moor-hen, who is suffering from a broken wing; he falls hard and fast for her, even as she keeps her distance, alert to the fact that, under normal circumstances, she might constitute his dinner.

The action and dialogue are infused with a thoroughly modern sensibility; the characters speak in a contemporary -- if stilted -- idiom and British accents are dispensed with. Huldey is given a power rock ballad near the end. Mastiff and Moor-hen are dressed in full elaborate nineteenth-century outfits, and they discuss his problems with depression. The effect is that of an outline for a typical period Gothic tale combined with a modern, highly skeptical commentary running alongside it.

But even assuming that, at this late date, we need to be informed that the fiction of the era was loaded with contradictions and unspoken assumptions about class and the sexes, Silverman's flat, uninflected voice provides no pleasure whatsoever. It's rather like listening to a humorless academic analyzing a text and, armed with historical hindsight, pointing out its numerous errors; the point is made early on and there's nothing to do but repeat it, seemingly endlessly.

Under Mike Donahue's direction, the cast attacks this material with varying degrees of success. The most interesting performance by far comes from Chasten Harmon as Emilie, who first comes across as a standard breathless ingénue, but who responds to Agatha's wooing and later assumes a coolly commanding persona of her own. Linda Powell is less persuasive as Agatha; she has the manner down, but her performance lacks both mystery and menace. Birgit Huppuch, as Huldey, starts on a note of near-madness and pretty much stays there throughout. Hannah Cabell works the Marjory/Mallory joke for all it's worth, which isn't much. Andrew Garman's Mastiff and Teresa Avia Lim's Moor-hen are quite the oddest couple you are likely to run into this season; he finds the murderous possessiveness in his character's devotion and she remains charming even as they hack through reams of dialogue about their relationship problems.

Still, the production has a look and sound that establish an effectively creepy mood. In addition to Laffrey's set, Anita Yavich's costumes are gorgeously detailed. Working in a relatively narrow palette, Yavich delivers outfits suitable to each character yet also simply beautiful to behold. The intensively tailored black ensemble worn by Agatha gives a classically sinister appearance -- rather like Mrs. Danvers, the evil housekeeper in Rebecca -- that goes a long way toward explaining her dominance of the household. M. L. Dogg's sound design ranges from effects like howling wind, flapping bird wings, and cawing crows to high-decibel reinforcement for Huldey's eleven o'clock number (composed by Daniel Kluger). Working five vertical LED bars each at stage right and stage left, Jen Schriever delivers a number of eerie sidelight washes, in both white and various saturated colors; at times: it's a modern concept that is highly suitable for a play that applies a contemporary eye to vintage material; however, the actors are frequently posed in front of these blindingly bright lights, with results that are painful to the eye.

Throughout, The Moors offers satire without any real verve or wit; Silverman neither suggests what is alluring about the Gothic romance genre nor does she provide a particularly trenchant critique of it. Thus, her house of horrors is built on a shaky foundation, and her depiction of it lacks affection and fresh insight. She does, if unintentionally, provide her own critique of the play. After Agatha has read Huldey's diary, she comments, "There was monotony, repetition, poor attention to detail, a plaintive narrator's voice that did little to endear itself the reader... but mostly, to be candid, it was boring." Honestly, I can't do better than that. -- David Barbour