photo: Stephanie Berger
Lincoln Center is presenting, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Teorema. The script is adapted from the Pasolini film (in turn adapted from his novel) by the show’s Flemish director, Ivo van Hove. The company is Toneelgroep Amsterdam, performing in Dutch with English supertitles provided.
The characters in Teorema almost always talk not exactly to us or to themselves, but out loud, for our sake. They almost never talk to one another. Sometimes they speak in third person, occasionally in the first. Occasionally they speak in the third person and then repeat the line in the first person. Sometimes they don’t speak at all, and a heavy silence lingers on the stage.
Indeed, this is the ultimate in verfremdungseffekt. The characters speak into microphones, so that even the acting is deconstructed.
Usually they tell us what they’re doing while they’re physically doing something else, or while they’re doing nothing but wandering the stage. However, sometimes they tell us what they’re doing while they’re doing it. “I clench my hand in a fist,” she says, while clenching her hand in a fist. Hearing an actor describe what she’s doing while she’s doing it is repulsive.
The script is a cross between a soap opera and a Dumas novel. We’re subjected to lines like “Your love was a consolation, but now you’re pushing me closer to the abyss,” and “I know your sadness is inconsolable and does not even want consolation.” There’s never a let-up to this pretentiousness, so we become inured to any effect the overblown prose might have.
There’s no through line in this play, only episodes. Nameless man visits a smug bourgeois family, seduces everyone, leaves. The family members are in one emotion at a time, and they always share the same emotion. They only have three – longing, lust, and loss. The handsome, dark-skinned guest is lust himself.
Minimalist, the script, actors and director give us no more than they must to make their sharp, scathing point. The characters are without motivation; they execute the action of the play like somnambulists, or robots. They are as James Joyce wrote of the Artist as a Young Man: “Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.”
The set is broad and wide and flat, grey on grey, with angles – no curves - dull and tense and loveless, like its occupants. The characters trash it after the nameless demonic leaves.
Only one character survives the loss intact. In a magnificent, searing moment, he throws off his body mike and comes alive with a defiant scream.
Van Hove’s work is bold, stunning, flawlessly executed, and directors would do well to note some of these techniques. But he directs like an ideologue, so committed to his intellectual premise that he takes us somewhere we don’t want to go. The trip’s too difficult.
A marvelous string quarter called Blindman! [new strings] sits on stage and plays beautiful, lugubrious classical music. Sometimes they run the turntables that are on stage for no reason.
The play is staged in a repurposed warehouse on Governor’s Island, in New York Harbor. We had to take a short ferry ride to get the island, and then we walked for 20 minutes to the venue (on the hottest day since the Big Bang). Now, Lincoln Center can afford a shuttle bus. If they made us walk, it’s because they want to give the production a distance from our ordinary lives (as if there weren’t enough distance in the script). They want to put the production in bold face by making us invest in it. But that’s no excuse. The play would be better served by a parlor reading than a production in this expansive space.
- Steve Capra
July 2010
Other reviews:
New York Times
New York Post
