Theatre in Review: Neva (The Public Theater)

	Bianca Amato, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and Luke Robertson. Photo: Carol Rosegg

The words -- anguished, furious, shot through with longing, and frequently dripping with acid -- come in raging rivers in Neva. If lengthy stretches of prose, thick as borscht with sour cream and with the destabilizing kick of a vodka chaser, get you excited, this is the play for you. The Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón has conjured up a fever dream of art and politics, punctuating it with densely written arias that none but the most skilled and steel-nerved actors should even think about attempting.

For example, it begins with Olga Knipper, widow of Anton Chekhov, in St. Petersburg, rehearsing a bit of The Cherry Orchard. Unhappy with the results, she unleashes her dissatisfaction:

"This damned monologue is not coming out right. Rasputin is more truthful than I am. And now I'm panicking. I already know what will happen. Opening night will come next Saturday and all the Saint Peters bourgeois women will come to see me. And the other actresses, too, to see me. To see me fall, to see Olga Knipper fall. To see me go off-key and say these beautiful words soullessly. They'll laugh at the wrong parts and crumple their chocolate wrappers. But at the end, when the play is over and they see me smile, grateful, and humiliated ... they'll applaud, smiling through clenched teeth. And they'll wait for me in the hallway by the heat, with a halo of perfume masking the scent of sweat of which every dramatic actress with any self-respect reeks ..."

It goes for another 150 lines or so; it practically pulsates with contempt for the audience. ("And those cows will say, with breath like tar and vodka-bloated lips, that I'm a bad actress. That I'm a dilettante, that I'm the broken puppet of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavski. That I'm a hen, a harlot, a hillbilly.") She isn't much easier on herself. ("I've become coarse. I do not feel.") And then there are her expressions of mourning. ("I thought that leaving Moscow for a month to work in the city of the Czar and Czarina would help me heal my heart, broken by the death of my writer just six months ago.") The speech is a tour-de-force, the kind of thing you'd normally find at a play's climax, but as far as Calderón is concerned, it is only a warm-up. Fortunately, he has the assistance of Bianca Amato, an actress with technique to spare: Her Olga is imperious, scathing, devastated, self-loathing, and incandescent with anger, and often blackly hilarious. More than once you'll be asking yourself if what you're seeing is a woman riven with emotion or an actress coolly practicing her technique.

Olga is soon joined by a colleague, Aleko, a young man of noble birth who received his early training from a serf who took to the stage ("He said that acting was like suffering for love; his eyes were always full of tears") and Masha, who is so dedicated to her craft that she admits to having had sex with Aleko in order to build up sense memories for a role that was giving her trouble. The three of them set about reliving Chekhov's death, trying it from different angles and points of view in order to scare up fresh emotions; for Olga, the act of making herself relive the most harrowing experience of her life is merely business as usual.

Despite their repeated attempts, nothing really works until Aleko suddenly goes off on a tangent. "Olga, I'm a scab," he cries. "I didn't have shoes until I was thirteen years old, the only milk I drank was from my mother's and my sister's breasts when they had babies. My father beat me. I never saw him sober, and he never looked me in the eye." He holds the two women rapt with his scalding confessions -- until he casually admits it's all part of a monologue, based on Dostoevsky, on which he has been working.

There's much more to Neva than the business of cultivating those hothouse blooms. When Aleko first shows up, he says, "If no one has come to this rehearsal it's because today is a bloody Sunday." Actually, it is Bloody Sunday, the day in January 1905, when Russian citizens, attempting to present a petition to the Tsar, were gunned down; some accounts place the fatalities in the thousands. There are other rumbles of thunder happening just outside the stage door: Among the names dropped by the characters are Vyacheslav von Plehve, a minister of the interior who was killed when a bomb was tossed into his carriage, and Father Gapon, a cleric and labor leader turned revolutionary. At one point, Masha, the best-informed of the three, says, "Even the sailors on the Black Sea are rebelling because they're forced to eat meat full of worms" -- a reference to the Potemkin mutiny, commemorated in Sergei Eisenstein's monumental silent film.

And it is certainly not lost on Calderón that as the outside world explodes, these three are obssessively gazing into their navels, looking for a route into his or her soul. Among them, Olga is the most likely to see herself as burnt-out case ("I already burned up all my coal and oil."), but when the exercise demands, she always has a fresh supply of feelings at the ready. As off-putting as this may sound, much of Neva is mesmerizing, thanks to the lush language and extraordinarily committed cast, and the author's mordant questions about the fitness of refining your artistic soul while a political order trembles and blood is flowing in the streets.

Neva is a startling, original, and accomplished piece of work with one major, possibly deal-breaking, flaw: Under Calderón's direction, it maintains the same note of manic intensity over the course of 80 minutes, an effort that may well leave you feeling punch drunk from the assaultive words and emotions. By the time Masha, the in-house revolutionary, launches into a climactic denunciation of Olga and Aleko and art in general, you may find yourself impressed less by the speech than by the sheer stamina of Quincy Tyler Bernstine's delivery of this climactic passage, which is so breathless it verges on hyperventilation; it concludes with a surprise that roused the audience to an ovation. If sheer intensity were enough to carry a play, Neva would be the success of the season.

Both ladies are superb, as is Luke Robertson as Aleko; furthermore, Andrea Thome's muscular translation feels ideally suited to the occasion. But Neva is easier to admire than to feel enthusiastic about because the net effect is so draining. Perversely adding to the difficulty, it is played on a tiny raised stage lit only by a single floor unit reminiscent of an electric heater. If the sight of three bodies trapped in a single blazing light is an attention-getter at first, it comes to feel like the height of affectation; equally unnecessary is the moment when the lighting is turned around, blinding those seated in the center section of the Anspacher Theatre. (The only credited designer is Susan Hilfery, who did the costumes.) Nobody at Neva wants to make it easy for the audience; that's admirable to the extent that it doesn't overwhelm the idea of the play.--David Barbour