A Healthy Dose of Misery for Company By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

October 26, 2008
A Healthy Dose of Misery for Company By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

THE world is trembling with anxiety. Fingernails are being chewed across America as the presidential race enters its last innings, and the financial Tilt-a-Whirl of the past month has left everyone from Riga to Reykjavik to Rochester unsettled. I am surely not alone in averting my eyes when firing up a search engine for fear that my home page will feature a stock graph resembling a ski slope.

The time is ripe for some giddy escapism, with crowds stampeding multiplexes to see “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” I too have seen “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” It’s cute. Not once does a talking dog make gloomy reference to his 401(k).

I’ll also admit to fleeing the spinning wheel of doomsaying economists on the news networks for the most unedifying of alternatives. I have seen every episode of “The Rachel Zoe Project,” the Bravo series about a pampered stylist to the stars — kind of a Beverly Hills Chihuahua herself, in her fur shrugs and froggy glasses — whose greatest worries are whether her peevish pair of assistants will learn to get along, and where her next venti cappuccino is coming from.

Something tells me that Rachel Zoe has not allowed the global tumult to pull her focus from the pressing need to find Debra Messing the right gown for the Emmys. Oh, to be Rachel Zoe. Or one of her blithely bickering assistants. Or, for that matter, her venti cappuccino cup.

And what is the New York theater offering to lift the load of woe from our hearts? Well, there’s the usual fun to be had, in the form of standbys like “The Lion King” or last season’s somewhat exhausting farce “Boeing Boeing.” And the fleet-footed “Billy Elliot” is warming up at the barre.

But in a case of colossal bad timing, the most notable, the most accomplished — the most important — new productions of the fall theater season so far are as dark-hued as theater gets: Ian Rickson’s existential take on “The Seagull” on Broadway and the shattering Sarah Kane play “Blasted” at Soho Rep.

See them both in a single day and, well, you won’t be worrying about your retirement plan anymore. You will probably be sitting in a padded cell, staring into some inward abyss. Still, as an unabashed partisan of serious theater, I’m happy to make a case for embracing these undeniably harrowing evenings. Three cheers for misery, I say. It may hurt, but it can be healthy.

Of course it’s simplistic to say that good sad plays are moral or emotional tonics, like fiber cereal for the soul. But on some level it is fundamentally true. Escapist entertainment can offer fleeting rewards, but in the long run only art really nourishes. Sure, it’s sweet to daydream our way into the worlds inhabited by George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, but it’s more important for us all to know ourselves. Great theater, like much high art, tells us who we are, not who we would like to be.

You could make the argument — well, I could, anyway — that some of the havoc caused by the subprime mortgage crisis can be traced to a collective amnesia on the part of the powers that be about the essence of human nature. At one point Alan Greenspan argued that it was not the lack of regulation that caused the firestorm; it was an excess of greed on Wall Street. He didn’t see that coming?

This apparent ignorance of our baser nature among top-tier economists should be quickly cured, lest more problems be caused. I hereby recommend for them a crash course in what men and women are, and what they will do to survive and prosper when the restraints of civilization fall away. I prescribe an evening in the hair-raising company of “Blasted.”

As with an inoculation, a single visit will suffice. “Blasted” is not a play to be seen more than once; an experience this unsettling would not have the same impact if it were repeated. Fortunately for New Yorkers, the play has arrived in a superlative production, directed by Sarah Benson, that does full justice to the integrity of Ms. Kane’s singular vision. (It is only to be regretted that it took more than a dozen years after its London premiere for the play to be produced here at all.)

Theater watchers have probably heard a few hints about the grisly details of the plot. The play begins as a reunion between a jaded journalist and his younger former lover in a well-appointed hotel room. He is cynical, bitter, death-haunted and cruel; she is gentle, wary, intellectually handicapped. The evening ends unhappily, in fact brutishly. And then, the morning after, the play suddenly explodes into a savage allegory of survival amid the wreckage of a civilization riven by martial conflict.

Descriptions give little sense of the play’s impact in the theater, just as reading the script would provide only a sketchy impression of its potential to latch onto the viscera and squeeze tightly. I have seen much theater seasoned with outrageous acts of violence — like Tracy Letts’s gnarly noir comedy-dramas and Martin McDonagh’s blood-drenched tales of Irish backwaters. In almost all of them, violence onstage is trimmed with humor that disarms our instinct to recoil, or serves a story and a set of characters conveniently removed from the realm of the real.

Not so “Blasted.” Each moment of the play feels like a moment in real time, depicting actual experience, even when the play dissolves from naturalism into something closer to expressionism. The brutalizers are not villains but petty, unexceptional men. And Ms. Kane’s aim is not mere entertainment, or even provocation; it’s revelation — of how men and women revert to feeding their most basic hungers when their existence is threatened, or when exposure to brutality has corroded their humanity.

Without moralizing for an instant, Ms. Kane imbues her play with a deep moral vision; the clinical manner in which she presents the descent into bestiality condemns the cheapening of suffering that is in so many violence-riddled works. Life is so brutal, and people so potentially cruel, the play argues, that to sentimentalize or temporize is to settle for a soothing lie.

If “Blasted” all but flays your soul, Chekhov’s “Seagull” strums gently on the heartstrings, although its worldview is hardly more comforting. “Blasted” depicts man’s potential for savagery in extraordinary circumstances; “The Seagull” is a drama of ordinary sadness, everyday frustration, more attuned to our capacity to disappoint than to destroy. Chekhov was no less dry-eyed than Ms. Kane as he observed his characters’ self-absorption, and he was no less heart-sore, at bottom, that life should be this way.

Although Chekhov classified “The Seagull” as a comedy, and the actors — led by the ravishing Kristin Scott Thomas as the vain Arkadina — infuse their performances with a gentle awareness of their characters’ absurdities, the production strikes a consistently bleak note. Mr. Rickson and Christopher Hampton, who provided the supple new English translation, quietly but insistently trace the agony of hopes unrealized: the yearning for understanding that is denied, the aching, desperate sense that the possibility of happiness is decaying moment by moment.

The somber palette, the eerie, shuddering music and the echoing silences between speeches subtly underscore the play’s proto-existentialist underpinnings. Even the symbolist drama written by Konstantin, which is almost always played for comedy as the arch attitudinizing of an immature writer, radiates a dark fundamental truth here. The production honors the honest emotion behind Konstantin’s clumsy poetry, the ache for a “universal soul” that would unite the scattered hearts of humanity.

Tellingly, a single phrase — “If you only knew” — echoes like a musical refrain throughout Mr. Hampton’s text. “If you only knew how much I hated leaving you!” Nina confesses to the assembled company when she must leave the charmed circle on Sorin’s estate to return home. “If you only knew how much they upset me,” Polina complains when her husband causes an unnecessary kerfuffle. “If you only knew how unhappy I am,” Konstantin upbraids Nina, repeating the same phrase to his mother when he has lost Nina’s love. “If you only knew!” the distraught Nina cries to Konstantin in her last scene, unable to describe the suffering she’s endured.

The words cut to the heart of the mournful truth the play illuminates. Each of the characters looks desperately for understanding from another, while more often than not denying a similar understanding to someone else. It’s not that they are heartless; no production I’ve seen contains so many fully rounded portraits. But Chekhov seemed to sense that obstacles to true communion are built into the human condition. We are so absorbed in our own experience — the slights and aches, the romantic hopes and comforting illusions — that everyone else’s can be impossible to fathom, even if we believe ourselves to be compassionate people, highly sensitized to the suffering of others.

In flush times, ignorance of this natural tendency toward solipsism is lamentable; in dark times, as Ms. Kane’s play so gruesomely illustrates, it can be dangerous. Neither of these plays leaves you in the carefree frame of mind of your average lapdog from Beverly Hills. You are left instead with a tense awareness of the frailty of human happiness and social equilibrium, the potential for tragedy that shadows all existence, but also a grateful appreciation for art that speaks somber truth in a manner that is as honest as it is humane.