Theatre in Review: The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre) Having spent nearly five hours in one day taking in The Hallway Trilogy, I can say with total confidence that it is a trilogy about... a hallway. I'd like to be more specific, but I'm at a loss. The program notes suggest that Adam Rapp's plays are linked by "themes of suffering and redemption" -- a fairly catch-all phrase. David Van Asselt, Rattlestick's artistic director, says in a press release, "Adam has found a different and, for me, compelling take on the nature of a trilogy, on what binds people together and how they move forward in the future." --a statement applicable to anything from The Oresteia to The Norman Conquests. To my eyes, however, Rapp's plays share only their mutual setting - the hallway of a seedy apartment building on the Lower East Side. . The plays of The Hallway Trilogy are separated by intervals of 50 years apiece. The first, Rose, is set on the day in 1953 when Eugene O'Neill died. That's bad news for the title character, a faintly desperate would-be actress who is convinced she has found the home of the eminent playwright, whom she refuses to believe has passed away. There is a Gene O'Neal on the premises, but he is the grotesque, obese superintendent who solicits sexual favors from rent-strapped female tenants. Others in the building get drawn into Rose's hallway vigil, including a Russian immigrant who lives with his morbidly fat, foul-smelling mother; a young Princeton grad - and possible Communist-- who has opted to dwell among the working classes; a lonely female schoolteacher; a neighborhood enforcer; and, most bizarrely, a mute young man who comes and goes, spying on the others, tossing marbles, and in general spreading hints of the sinister. Paraffin, the second play, is set on the night of the New York blackout in 2003. Margo, who has a dead-end job in publishing, has to contend with her husband, Denny, a drug-wasted, gambling-addicted musician, and his brother, Lucas, a wheelchair-bound cripple who loves her intensely. Surrounding them are, among others, an older gay man and his hustler; the collector for a loan shark; and an immigrant Jewish couple. Violence looms over the action, and there is a ghostly visitation from Rose. Both of these plays are typical of Rapp in terms of his strengths and weaknesses. As is almost always the case, he comes up with unusual situations and broad galleries of characters -- and yet it's almost impossible to become engaged with these people and their problems. It's not a matter of creating characters who we can like or identify with - plenty of great dramas are populated entirely by repellent souls -it's that none of them seem to matter very much. You'll have to steel yourself at times, as the author's famous obsession with bodily excretions is given full range here. In Paraffin, Denny is first seen passed out in the hallway, having soiled himself. He gets up, removes his pants, and stands with his back to the audience - all the better for us to see that his rear end is encrusted with feces, which he wipes away. His brother spins around the stage in his wheelchair waving his bared genitals at a shocked observer. Each play is dotted with instances of flatulence, some of which are positively symphonic in effect. Far more interesting -- and, at the same time, off-putting -- is the third play, Nursing. It is now 2053, and disease has been eradicated from the world. (Paradise has not been achieved, however; California has been nuked by terrorists and, in retaliation, the US has bombed most of the Middle East to hell.) The building is no longer a residence and the hallway has been converted into a museum of disease. Lloyd, a volunteer who lives in a hospital room behind bulletproof glass, is given doses of fatal illnesses such as the Black Death and cholera, so museum visitors can track their pathologies. In each case, Lloyd is given an antidote just before he expires, and after a couple of weeks' bed rest, is injected with another pathogen. As staged by Trip Cullman, Nursing is loaded with striking and unsettling moments, even as it bogs down in contrivances. (For example, it's never explained why this hideous museum is located in a former downtown tenement - aside from the fact that, if the play doesn't unfold there, then there's no Hallway Trilog.) The author has imagined this disease-free future so he can comment that such an apparent accomplishment is more akin to a disaster -- if you rob life of pain you also rob it of its savor. But he makes this point early and often, and has nothing to add to it. Instead, the action devolves into a series of fits and fevers, building to a ludicrous climax in which Lloyd falls into the hands of a rebel group bent on reintroducing illness into the world -- their malady of choice is Black Frost, a fictional venereal disease that results in terrible chills, black urine, and choking. You can imagine the fun Rapp has with that. As presented by a trio of directors, a fine set of designers, and a cast of some of Off Broadway's more notable names, The Hallway Trilogy has all the marks of a first-class endeavor, but it ultimately reveals itself to be as pointless as it is elaborate. None of the plays stands on its own and they don't combine to any significant effect. The author's anhedonic tendencies prevent us from caring about the characters even as we are made to endure his unpleasant bodily obsessions. (There are moments when he makes Neil LaBute seem like a goodtime Charlie in comparison.) All three directors - Rapp (Rose), Daniel Aukin (Paraffin), and Cullman -- work fruitfully with the cast of actors who are seemingly willing to take on any challenge. Guy Boyd, his large gut hanging over his stained underwear, is a sight to see as Gene O'Neal, and is briefly touching as a lonely gay man suffering from diabetes. Louis Cancelmi is effective as a jittery would- be man of the people and as a male nurse who inexplicably wants to make out with the disease-ridden Lloyd. Maria Dizzia is a formidable presence as Joan, a nurse who doesn't mind a little mass murder now and then. Logan Marshall-Green delivers the touching wrap-up to Rose and makes a frighteningly convincing lab rat in Nursing. As Margo, Julianne Nicholson manages the trick of turning in the most sympathetic performance of the trilogy, even as her pregnant character boozes it up and speaks wistfully of getting an abortion. Jeremy Strong gives a comic spin to the role of a journalist who invades Lloyd's recovery room. And Katherine Waterston invests Rose with a real air of mystery and a heartbreaking delicacy. Beowulf Borrit's set, which completely reconfigures the Rattlestick's space, is a cunning conception; it's fun to return to each play simply to see how it has been redressed to fit its new time period. Tyler Micoleau's lighting includes some evocative morning and late-afternoon looks in the first two plays and the coruscating fluorescent glare of Nursing; one of the challenges of sitting through Paraffin, however, is trying to make out what's going on in dim candlelight in the second half. Jessica Pabst's costumes are perfectly true to the 1953 and 2003 settings, and she wisely doesn't go for any kind of oddball "futuristic" look for the third. Eric Shinn's sound design often suggests the life of the street outside, as well as the sounds of offstage televisions and radios; it's a little off-putting that much of the dialogue in Nursing, which takes place behind glass, is delivered via a speaker system. It's possible that The Hallway Trilogy may be easier to take when seen over three nights, as opposed to the frankly exhausting marathon I attended. Seeing it that way, however, may even further expose the lack of connective tissue. If nothing else, this enterprise proves there's a lot more to writing a trilogy than simply coming up with three plays.-- David Barbour 
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