Theatre in Review: Yerma (Young Vic/Park Avenue Armory)

	Billie Piper. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The set designer Lizzie Clachan has created a kind of human terrarium for Yerma, an appropriately clinical space in which to witness the tragedy of a woman driven to madness by her inability to conceive a child. It's a key aspect of Simon Stone's brilliantly theatrical staging, in which one bravura gesture follows another, anchored by performances that are sweepingly emotional and meticulously detailed. I'm betting that you won't be able to take your eyes off Billie Piper as a woman going down the drain into self-destruction. You may also wonder what Stone and company are getting at: Who is this woman, really, and why does she behave as she does?

This version of Yerma was written by Stone and is billed as being "after Federico García Lorca." Indeed, the two versions are separated by several country miles. Lorca's original is a stylized, ritualized tragedy of the Spanish countryside, featuring a heroine whose psyche has been shaped by the demands of church and patriarchy. Under these conditions, it is little wonder that her infertility drives her mad. (The name "Yerma" means barren.) She is emotionally dispossessed, left without a role to play in her society; surrounded by women and their children, her obsession festers. Before the play is over, blood will be spilled.

Despite the hat-tip to Lorca, Stone has created a near-original, transplanting Yerma into modern-day London. Her, the only name given to the leading lady, is a trendy journalist with a blog that lays bare every detail of her private life. John, her partner, has made it big in some unspecified business; as the play begins, they are moving into a town house in an emerging London neighborhood. They are lying around, on a bare floor, eating pizza and drinking champagne. The conversation is tipsy, flirty, and argumentative. It's the right moment for her to slyly raise the idea of children. John is surprised, because she, by her own admission, calls babies "stupid" and "completely self-centered, like a retarded cat." But she is thirty-three and worried that she might regret missing the moment. When Piper, with a grin that could power the grid of Manhattan, summons a look of surprised delight, like a kid walking into a surprise party, she is irresistible, so it's perhaps no surprise that John ransacks her purse for birth control pills, drops them on the floor, and stomps on them, in a ritual gesture: The journey to parenthood has begun, or so they think. In fact, they have taken the first tentative steps on the road to ruin.

About that terrarium set: Clachan has designed a rectangular playing space with the audience on both sides in bleacher seating. The actors, separated from us by glass walls, are fitted with mics, allowing them to give performances that are more cinematic than theatrical; they can throw away whole speeches and still be heard. James Farncombe's lighting bears down directly from overhead, adding to the sense of detachment. Staring at the actors in this sleek glass box, the comparisons fly through one's head: It's a human zoo, an operating theatre, a science project. Whatever the intention, this approach creates a distinctive double effect, both intimate and distancing. We are privy to the actors' slightest vocal shadings even as we regard them from a distance.

It's a stunning technical achievement in other ways: Stone's script is a series of jagged puzzle pieces, each representing a leap ahead in time of a few days or a few years, most of them cut off just as a climax is reached; during the very brief blackouts, characters come and go, and the stage is often radically redone. (There is no apparent way in or out of the glass box.) One scene, featuring a bare stage, blacks out; a few seconds later, the lights come up to reveal a roomful of furniture. A few minutes after that, the furnishings vanish into the brief darkness. It's a masterful act of sleight of hand, and I have no idea how it was accomplished.

So traffic-stopping are these gestures that, without sufficiently operatic performances, one might be distracted, wondering how the magic was made. There's little worry of that here: Piper charts her character's distress with precision, as her sense of expectation curdles into disappointment followed by rage mixed with desperation. She begins lashing out -- principally at John, whose business travel often keeps him away from her when she is ovulating -- a state of affairs that, she begins to believe, is intentional. But others become targets for her intensifying fury, both in face-to-face confrontations and in her brutally frank online writings in which she burns one bridge after another. She admits to being relieved, even happy, when her sister, Mary, miscarries. (Mary, who is unhappily married and suffered post-partum depression with her first child, is perfectly poised to inflame her sister's jealousy.) In a not-very-believable twist, Victor, her former boyfriend -- with whom she had an abortion -- is hired to work beside her. He now has a child of his own, from a brief, misbegotten relationship, and he soon finds a nice girlfriend, neither of which stops her from trying to seduce him for his seed. Meanwhile, the question of a sperm test becomes a major wedge issue between her and John, and the very mention of the word "adoption" cues the possibility of a major scene.

The sight of the radiant Piper imploding, the light going out of her eyes until she avoids looking directly at others, her body language becoming increasingly cramped, her voice reduced to a monotone, is certainly an arresting one; there can be little doubt that the actress has explored her character's descent, centimeter by centimeter. It's quite a spectacle, but rarely an emotionally gripping one. It's easy to believe that she would be deeply upset by her dilemma; one reads all the time about couples going to all sorts of extremes to conceive. But do they become unemployable and range from nearly catatonic to Aeschylean levels of anger? In uprooting this tragedy from the Spanish soil and replanting it in the world of busy twenty-first-century urbanites, it loses an element of believability.

Why, exactly, is her infertility causing her to summon the terrors of the earth? We are introduced to her mother, Helen, a fantastically brusque academic who is ignorant of the maternal arts; she even admits to having dreaded giving birth. And John, at one point, suggests that she is just another member of an entitled generation who believes that if she can dream it, she can have it. But, really, none of these arguments convince. Ultimately, the experience of watching her inside that box, coming apart spectacularly, comes to feel uncomfortably sadistic. This is not the pity and terror of tragedy; it is the distanced, sullen interest of a boy removing the wings from a fly. (At times of I thought of Catherine Deneuve, slipping into madness in Roman Polanski's Repulsion.)

The rest of the cast delivers solid performances on a level of intensity commensurate with the star. As John, Brendan Cowell has a superbly volatile chemistry with Piper, and, later on, he deflects her hostile advances with skill; their final reckoning, with them standing amid the ruins of a once-loving relationship, provides the production's most harrowing moments. Charlotte Randle has an especially fine encounter as Mary, who, having been scalded by her sister's online column, nevertheless reaches out to offer support. John MacMillan is appealing as Victor, who, by accident, ends up in his ex-lover's vortex and comes to regret it. Maureen Beattie is often very funny as Helen, whose anti-maternal stance is summed up in a supremely awkward mother-daughter embrace. Thalissa Teixeira has a couple of effective bits as an immature administrative assistant.

Farncombe's lighting gets a surprising range of looks, even in such a confined space, and his total blackouts are a major aid in achieving the scene changes. Stefan Gregory's sound design is thoroughly intelligible; he also provides a variety of musical genres, from a cappella vocals to snatches of Baroque melodies to thrash rock, all of which block the noise of moving scenery. Jack Henry James' videos establish the time frame of each scene, along with updates like "The cracks start to show." (The latter oddly reminded me of silent movie titles.)

Yerma won all sorts of awards during its engagement at the Old Vic in London, and there's no question that Stone and his collaborators have a keen sense of theatre; they also certainly know how to build excitement. But in Yerma, they have promised a tragedy and delivered a horror show. If, going in, you understand that fact and adjust your expectations, you should have a satisfying time. -- David Barbour