Theatre in Review: The Library (Public Theater)In The Library, a high school sophomore survives a Columbine-type tragedy only to find herself a defendant in the court of public opinion. Caitlin Gabriel was in the library, studying with a friend, when an intruder entered with a gun. She wakes up in the hospital severely wounded, but, since most of the other students were killed, she is one of the lucky ones. Or maybe not because already people are talking about her: When the killer approached her in the school library, did she direct him to the AV closet, where most of the others were hiding? Caitlin says no; another student says yes. Guess whose story proves most convincing? Not only is Caitlin sure that she didn't pass along the information that resulted in several students' deaths, she is equally certain it was done by Joy, a Christian student who was heard praying loudly throughout the ordeal. But Joy is dead and well on the way to becoming a martyr, thanks to her distraught, aggressively religious mother, Dawn, and Caitlin is being assigned quite a different role. Dawn busily holds prayer vigils and cuts deals for books and films about Joy's death, all of which puts Caitlin in a terrible position. Not only does her version of the story undermine Joy's reputation, it serves as a challenge to a start-up industry. If you're starting to get that Lillian Hellman feeling, you're not far off; The Library recalls The Children's Hour as it traces the toxic effects of an untruth. And, like Hellman, the playwright, Scott Z. Burns, draws the battle lines all too clearly, pitting Caitlin, who has a few secrets of her own, and her deeply flawed parents against Dawn, who, for all her very real grief, is also an agenda-driven monster hidden underneath a veil of piety. Dawn is not alone in practicing this peculiarly passive-aggressive form of forgiveness. Ryan, the boy who first leveled the accusation against Caitlin, spearheads a petition to keep her from returning to school. Even Caitlin's pastor is unwilling to believe her, saying, "But the vice-president has quoted those events and it's been in the news. In the paper. On TV." If The Library has more melodramatic verve than complexity of character or action, it is nevertheless watchable thanks to some tense confrontations, especially when Caitlin is facing down her notably unhelpful parents. Whenever Nolan, her father, tries to assert some kind of moral authority, she reminds him of the time he was caught accepting oral sex from his secretary. (Caitlin learned this story from Elizabeth, her mother, a woman for whom the concept TMI apparently doesn't exist.) There are also tingling encounters with a detective who clearly doesn't believe her, and with Dawn, who isn't about to let anyone get in the way of her canonization plan for Joy. Having created this situation and put all of the players in place, Burns doesn't resolve it satisfactorily, basically putting Caitlin through a physical and mental ordeal until a deus ex machina arrives in the form of the rather delayed police, providing an unimpeachable account of what happened. Even with its penchant for condescension -- the believers in the cast of characters are either credulous or connivers -- The Library would be a fairly gripping evening but for the extremely odd staging of Steven Soderbergh and his design team. The action unfolds in a sleek box, full of reflective surfaces designed by Riccardo Hernandez. Under normal circumstances, it would probably be difficult to light; in this case, David Lander suffuses the stage with backlighting washes and almost no front light. As a result, in only a couple of scenes are the actors' faces clearly visible; one spends most of the evening staring at silhouettes. And they are rather loud silhouettes: The actors are rather heavily miked by the sound designers Darron L. West and M. Florian Staab; not only is this unnecessary in the Newman Theater, it creates a ghostly, disembodied effect since we cannot see where the voices are coming from. (There is also too much movie-style music designed to tell us how to feel.) Even if Soderbergh is new to the theatre, he is an accomplished director, so all of this surely was intentional. But the result of these choices is terribly destructive, coming between the actors and the audience in a way that is the antithesis of live theatre and constantly distracting one's attention away from the plot and characters. It is the most blatant instance in many a season of a director sabotaging a play with his stylistic affectations. It's too bad because if you peer hard enough at the stage, you'll see remarkably persuasive performances by Chloë Grace Moretz as the alternately vulnerable and steely Caitlin; Michael O'Keefe as Nolan, who is both a loving parent and a bit of a weasel; Jennifer Westfeldt as Elizabeth, whose anger gets in the way of being a good mother; and Tamara Tunie as the no-nonsense detective with an especially nerve-wracking interrogation method. Lili Taylor works Dawn's ulterior manner for all it is worth, although the character is too transparent to be believed. On paper, The Library looked to be especially interesting for the fact that a noted director and screenwriter were taking a flyer on the stage, tackling white-hot subject matter in the process. The disappointment is double; it reduces its complex material into an all-too-easily digestible bit of melodrama, and its staging seems almost purposely designed to alienate the audience. Someone should have had a word with both of these notable artists.--David Barbour 
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