Cultural Affairs
THEATER REVIEW
'Small Tragedy' Buckles Under the Weight of Its Loaded Themes
By Paula Wasley
Any playwright unwise enough to name his play "Small Tragedy" is simply tempting the fates, not to mention unkind reviewers with fondness for a cheap joke. And the vaulting ambition of Craig Lucas's latest meta-drama, at Playwrights Horizons, is so blindingly apparent that even the most tentative of oracles would have no difficulty foretelling its downfall.
"Small Tragedy" is not, in fact, small. Or, at least, not short. Director Mark Wing-Davey could have misplaced a few scenes and no one would be the wiser. Nor is it a tragedy, in either the Aristotelian or the show-biz sense of the word. The play's halfhearted prologue does confess a general uncertainty of the distinction between the tragic and the merely sad. And by the time its convoluted plot has unraveled itself, it is fairly clear that tragedy is an overly lofty term for a story that is at best unfortunate, at worst bathetic. But given how high Lucas has set his sights, it is impressive that the play's final thud isn't more painful. If nothing else, you have to admire how pluckily "Small Tragedy" fails.
Scattershot in both structure and theme, "Small Tragedy" uses the play-within-a-play chestnut to explore the tragedy of modern existence. More specifically, it seizes on an amateur production of "Oedipus Rex" as a vehicle for discussing the American reaction to, and responsibility for, ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia. Along the way, the play lobs a few digressive and ultimately unresolved questions about friendship, AIDS and homosexuality.
The play's Oedipus is an articulate Bosnian named Hakija, whose mysterious charisma and provocative questions profoundly influence the fates of his five fellow thespians. It appears that the power of his personality is such that his mere presence can alter sexual preference, convert plodding prose into poetry, and transform suburban despair into heady passion. The play opens with an extended audition scene, which anyone who hasn't brushed up on classical drama since high school will find heavy going. It takes several flatly performed monologues to learn the merest tidbits about the actors' characters and past.
Even so, by the time auditions are over, we have seen enough to predict the trajectory of the overlabored first act. Hajika quickly earns the distrust and dislike of Fanny, an ingenuous first-time actress with a talent for accidental acuity, by duping her with a grisly cock-and-bull story about his origins. With his puppy-like desire to please, a gay dyslexic actor nicknamed Christmas soothes the insecurities of pretentious director Nathaniel, a Hollywood dropout. Nat's wife and ostensible co-director, Paola, brings marital tension and a barely concealed hysteria onto the set while, in the wings, a doe-eyed actress named Jen dissolves, overwhelmed, into tears. The rest of the first half is more of the same, only in greater, and often bewildering, detail.
It was a risky move for the director to play up the actors' amateurishness, as, theatrically speaking, it reinforces the perception that the cast perhaps isn't up to the challenge. And throughout the production, it remains ambiguous whether the cast's alternately wooden and melodramatic acting style is clever acting or mere incompetence. Hakija is adept at speechifying, but acts out surprise, contrition and despair remarkably badly. His monotone love-interest, Jen, is hardly plausible as either an accomplished Yale Rep actress or as Jocasta. Curiously enough, it is during the final performance of "Oedipus" that the actors appear at their most professional, as if they have rather more conviction in the words of Sophocles than in Lucas's. Of course, this high point may have something to do the sequence's dramatic staging. Content to furnish the rest of the scenes only with the barest student-theater props, Wing-Davey marshals an unexpected armory of theatrical special effects to bring an abridged "Oedipus" to life.
"Small Tragedy" deserves credit for its brave attempt to wrestle with such weighty themes as genocide, human nature and self-knowledge. The play, however, has serious structural flaws. Lucas clearly remembers his Chekhovian precepts about not putting guns on display unless you intend to fire them. Unfortunately, he delays shooting until the gunpowder has gone damp. An overdone hint, embedded in a drunken tell-all party-game scene, signals, with all the subtlety of a steamroller, that something is rotten in Denmark. By the time the play's dark secret is finally revealed, some 40 minutes later, the only reaction is jaded yawns.
A general lack of focus is compounded by confusing directorial choices. The interminable "Oedipus" bits are clear, but significant portions of the play's central plot unfold in simultaneous and competing conversations among cast members. Potentially powerful revelations, such as one character's HIV-positive diagnosis and another's abusive marriage, are drowned out by the din of voices and background television noise. The audience is forced to focus selectively on one muffled discussion at the expense of others and, frustratingly, often ends up not being able to understand any. This eavesdropping approach may be realistic in effect, but the aim of realism seems oddly out of place in a piece so emphatically theatrical. At other points, the play tends toward the opposite extreme of artifice. The galloping pace at which characters interrupt each other, and complete each other's thoughts and sentences, is a stagy conceit of theater at its most self-conscious.
Despite its heavy-handedness, "Small Tragedy" has a wandering plot that brings us to fascinating places. It is most successful in its vivid evocation and individualizing of the atrocities of war. When, in a boozy late-night bonding session, Hakija describes to Christmas in explicit detail the massacre that he says left him the sole survivor of his village, the focus begins to narrow to Hakija's past. For the actors and for us, the play becomes an attempt to grapple with questions of personal and collective accountability in the Bosnian ethnic conflict. The aim is worthy. However, with its eyes on such weighty and exalted themes, "Small Tragedy" inevitably is done in by its own hubris.
All work is the property of the author whose byline appears with the story. If you wish to publish all or part of any story, please send your e-mail request to webmaster@jrn.columbia.edu. Any comments directed to that address will be forwarded to the appropriate parties.