Theatre in Review: Smokefall (MCC Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)

	Tom Bloom, Taylor Richardson. Photo: Joan Marcus

Smokefall is a poignant family saga, an ontological vaudeville show, and a time-bending, reality-twisting discussion of predestination versus free will, not to mention a meditation on the meaning of life. Before you click off, I hasten to add that it is funny, moving, and distinguished by the lightest of touches. The playwright, Noah Haidle, has gotten himself into a Thornton Wilder mood, but, resourceful fellow that he is, has invented his own style of play with which to pursue his own singular philosophical ends.

The Thornton Wilder part turns up in the first scene, which comes complete with its own narrator; he is named Footnote, and, as played by Zachary Quinto, fills us in on the melancholy facts behind the scene of a family at breakfast. (It's funny to have Quinto, last seen as Tom in The Glass Menagerie, once again appear as the all-knowing observer of a fragile, troubled family.) Certain details seem dangerously whimsical: Violet, the mother, is carrying twins -- they are mistakes, we are told right away -- to whom she speaks all day long. Her 16-year-old daughter, Beauty, has stopped speaking altogether, having, several years earlier, announced, "I have nothing more to say." She has also abjured normal food, instead preferring to breakfast on a pail of dirt followed by a nice, cold glass of paint. (The cuteness quotient of this is cut somewhat when we learn that her silence occurred after she overhead Daniel screaming for peace and quiet; her bizarre diet is a response to a parental argument about money.) Somehow Haidle works such bizarre facts into a family portrait that is both mundane and crazily fantastical. Other bits of information cast an even sadder shadow: Footnote reveals that the Colonel, Violet's father, is slipping into dementia, and Daniel, Violet's husband, who feels stifled to death by the responsibilities of marriage and family life, will leave for work that day, never to return.

The vaudeville comes next: In one of the more jarring transitions of the season, the action shifts to, well, the inside of Violet's uterus, rendered by the set designer Mimi Lien as a mini-stage surrounded by clear lightbulbs and backed by a sheer red curtain. This is where the in-utero twins (Quinto again, and Brian Hutchison, who played Daniel in the previous scene) are decked out in red plaid suits and bow ties, looking rather like a burlesque comedy team rather than the fetuses they are. As unborn babies go, they could hold their own at the Sorbonne. For example, the prospect of birth leaves Hutchison's fetus fearful. "I'm just a little worried about original sin," he says. "We're going to inherit the distortion of the nature of man. Weakness, ignorance, suffering, and the inevitability of death." A little later, he quotes Michel Foucault's definition of the family. Quinto's fetus, fed up with his brother's epistemological anxieties, snaps, "Don't start with post-structuralism again!" It's a rollicking episode that never strays too far from the melancholic tone of the first scene, especially when the birth ends in partial tragedy.

I'm reluctant to say more, except to add that the action jumps ahead several decades, where we meet one of the twins, now elderly and in retreat from the world; his son, who brings news that his father may or may not want to hear; Beauty, who, let's just say, is looking awfully good for her age; and more than one ghost from the past. The argument about inherited flaws versus personal responsibility continues to reverberate through the family's house, where many time frames seem to exist at once. Ultimately, equilibrium is restored among the generations with a burst of good news that ensures the family's story will continue on its crooked, sometimes merry, way.

Haidle has given himself quite a tightrope to walk, blending domestic drama with wild flights of fancy and vaudeville-like routines, the farcical often occupying the same space as a pervasive melancholy. But darn it if he doesn't pull it off, shifting dramatic and emotional gears with the skill of a top race car driver, even as he conducts a conversation about the forces that shape our lives: chance, choice, genes, and destiny, if there is such a thing. In the event, he is lucky to have as his director Anne Kauffman, who firmly establishes an anything-goes mood that can accommodate the play's many tonal and stylistic switches.

Kauffman has also recruited an unusually nimble ensemble: Tom Bloom is touching as the Colonel, his mind slipping into the past ("I still have 14 hours before I go to sleep," he announces, giving us a sense of his daily tedium) and as Johnny, one of the twins, who, late in life, becomes a recluse, abandoning his loved ones to tend the apple tree that marks a significant moment in the family's history. Hutchison is delightful as the more anxiety-prone of the fetuses and quietly wrenching as Daniel, who loves his family even as he flees them. When Beauty finally speaks, she is given an uncommonly long and complex monologue -- a daunting assignment for any actress -- but the young Taylor Richardson aces it, providing the philosophical groundwork for the play's sort-of-happy finale. Quinto has arguably the most challenging assignment, appearing as Footnote, one of the fetuses, and finally as Johnny's devoted, if frustrated, son; he achieves three distinct characterizations without resorting to technical tricks. Making her stage debut, the film and television actress Robin Tunney is affecting as Violet, whose determined cheerfulness and unconditional love for her family are heartbreaking.

If Kauffman's direction seems admirably sure-handed, however, the play's design seems slightly confused. Most of the action takes place in the family's house, which is rendered in anonymous and unsightly plyboard. This is apparently a strategy by Lien to avoid elaborate scenic changes signaling the passage of time; it is also, I think, meant to keep the audience from knowing right away the time frame of the first scene. But the costume designer, Ásta Bennie Hostetter, goes in another direction entirely, dressing the characters in mid-20th-century clothing that gives the game away. The two approaches are at odds, adding a slight -- and, I think, unwelcome -- uncertainty to the first scene. This becomes less of an issue as the play goes on, aided by David Weiner's sensitive, meticulous lighting and Lindsay Jones' sound design, which includes the earthquake rumble of birth pangs.

In any case, it is no small achievement to write a stylistically eccentric play, focusing on a small group of unremarkable people, which lends a wide-angle view of the human predicament: what it is like to be one of billions in a mysterious universe, yet certain that one's life has value, and to be making profound choices without fully grasping the forces that shape one's life. The title, by the way, comes from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "Time past and time future/allow but a little consciousness./To be conscious is not to be in time/But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden/The moment in the arbour where the rain beat/The moment in the draughty church at smokefall/Be remembered; involved with past and future/Only through time time is conquered." Lovely words for a lovely play. -- David Barbour