Theatre in Review: Poison (Origin Theatre Company/Theatre Row)

	Birgit Huppuch, Michael Laurence. Photo: Lou Montesano

The program for Poison notes that, in 2010, it won an award for best Dutch play staged that year -- but what grabs one's attention right away is its distinctively grim premise: The two characters, known only as She and He, meet up, ten years after their divorce, to deal with a grisly reality, namely an apparent problem with toxins in the groundwater of the cemetery where their young son is buried. This issue is quickly put aside, however, allowing the pair ample time to root around in their ashes of their extinguished relationship.

From the outset, Erwin Maas' production of Lot Vekemans' drama is filled with clues that we are in for a dreary evening. Jian Jung's set is forbiddingly spare, a white playing area carved out of the surrounding blackness, with only a bench and soda dispenser for décor. Michael Laurence, the male half of the cast, is already on stage as we enter, standing around and looking mighty uncomfortable. The action begins with the countertenor Jordan Rutter, in the lighting booth, singing a mournful tune. Later, he will appear on stage, passing through during a pause in the onstage hostilities. Every detail indicates that this is a properly severe, emotionally clipped European art object of a play; it practically oozes significance.

The action, if we can call it that, consists of constant back-and-forth between the two, a dialogue that is informed by much prevarication, submerged anger, and plenty of passive-aggressive fencing. Much of it is determinedly banal:

He: I only got it the day before yesterday.

She: I didn't know if you'd get it in time.

He: I meant to phone you to say I was coming. But em... I'm not much of a phoner.

She: No, no, I've noticed.

He: But I'm here.

She: Yes, you're here. You been here long?

He: Twenty minutes. Half an hour, at most.

She: Have you already been to his grave?

He: It looks lovely.

She: I do my best.

He: It's quiet here.

She: It usually is in cemeteries.

I understand the need for exposition -- one can hardly jump headfirst into the main conflict on page five -- but after twenty minutes or more of this, I was ready for a long, long rest myself.

Vetemans clearly establishes this pair's emotional dynamic. He is casual, evasive, studiedly polite. She is simmering with barely controlled rage, eager to wound him any way she can. We start to get the picture when she announces that she knows not only the exact day that he left -- it was New Year's Eve, after all -- but also the hour and minute. Not one for levity, she suddenly grabs him and picks up him, making a catty comment about his weight, but her wan sense of fun is dispelled when she learns that he has remarried. Even more galling, his wife is pregnant. He is also planning on committing what may be, to her, the ultimate crime -- writing a book about their son's death and its emotional aftermath.

When it finally gets down to its fundamental conflict -- she is frozen in time, unable to move past their son's death, while he has created a new life for himself -- Poison starts to acquire a dramatic spine, especially when the characters' claws come out. She pronounces the book project "pathetic." He asks, "You'd rather be your grief?" "Yeah, yeah, maybe I would, yeah," she says. "Maybe that's preferable to...to...giving it away to whoever. Just because they happen to pay 15 euros for it. If you're lucky." She also grills him about the sex of his forthcoming child and issues one scathing comment after another about his new life. Then she bops him one, producing a bloody nose.

There is, I suppose, the basis for a potent drama here, but it gets dragged down by a superabundance of glum chitchat; the stark, colorless production design; and an oppressive atmosphere of despair. Even given the tragedy that has scarred her life, she comes off as a nag; he is a little easier to take, but in neither case has the playwright supplied the telling details that might make them come alive as individuals. They remain as generic as their names, posed figures on a battlefield of sorrow.

Birgit Huppuch has the tougher assignment here, trying to locate the authentic pain inside a querulous woman who, ten years on, has seemingly made no attempt to deal with her loss. Many of her lines are delivered in her upper register, giving them an unpleasantly whiny quality; at times, she sounds like a child who doesn't want to be put to bed. Later on, when engaged in full-on combat with her ex, her performance gains in stature, but she is hamstrung by a script that gives her so little to work with. Laurence is much better in the early scenes, when his character knows he is walking on eggshells, desperately trying to prevent a row; when he finally unsheathes his anger, it is formidable. He also makes something touching of the announcement that his character has joined a local choir, where he has learned to take particular comfort in "It Must Be So," that aria by Leonard Bernstein of loss from Candide. Rutter's singing is nothing less than gorgeous, but why is he there? He seems to have wandered in from some 1960s art-house flick.

Jung's costumes are certainly appropriate to the characters and the rainy weather in which they find themselves -- in this play, even Nature weeps -- and the lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and sound by Sam La Frage are solid. But this is a dispiriting experience; rather than making real drama of it, Poison oversells its tragedy, trapping it in a generic atmosphere of gloom. It wants to browbeat us into caring about its characters; that's not the way it works.--David Barbour