Theatre in Review: Oklahoma! (St. Ann's Warehouse)

	Patrick Vaill. Photo: Teddy Wolff

"Let's not break the law. Let's bend it a little." So says Aunt Eller near the end of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, words that the director, Daniel Fish, and his company have taken to heart. Indeed, they have applied extreme pressure to this classic musical, bending it, in the words of Hammerstein, as fer as it can go. The action unfolds on a set, by Laura Jellinek, that consists of a basketball-court-sized space encased in untreated wood and ringed with picnic tables. The costumes are thoroughly contemporary. A couple of scenes are played in total darkness, or with a live video feed that covers one entire wall of the theatre. New orchestrations and arrangements give a score of standards the feeling of a night at the Grand Ole Opry. And the action climaxes with a spray of blood that soils the white wedding outfits of leading characters Curly and Laurey. As Aunt Eller might say, What next?

If everything's up to date in this Oklahoma!, the results -- unlike those of many other high-concept stagings of classics -- are largely fascinating, because Fish and company don't impose on this beloved musical ideas imported from left field. With one or two major exceptions -- which we'll get to, in a moment -- they tease out the minor notes consciously applied by the authors, using them to create distinctly discordant melody.

And, really, why not? A show enshrined as a classic piece of Americana -- like a painting by Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton, or a ballet like Appalachian Spring or Rodeo -- has some remarkably unpleasant aspects: a sexually conflicted heroine, a near-psychopathic villain, the threat of rape, an act of manslaughter, and a climactic bit of rough justice that is the opposite of a fair trial -- after all, the defendant has a honeymoon train to catch. All this mischief takes place in 1906, a year before Oklahoma achieved statehood, when a frontier devoted to cattle-raising is slowly being civilized, as farmers (and later, oil riggers) move in and take over. It's a vital, unruly place, with high spirits and untamed fury bubbling over, both at once.

The production's unique qualities are apparent from the moment Damon Daunno, as Curly, with his lazy cowboy lope and a falsetto register that is his way of baying at the moon, launches into a slow, intense version of "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top." (He has already done quite nicely with the show's opener, "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," thank you.) Curly sings to impress the skeptical Laurey, who is resisting attending a box social with him that evening; here, he practically hypnotizes her with his seductive approach. A single glance from Rebecca Naomi Jones tells you that Laurey is falling for this pitch, and she hates herself for it. Shoring up her defenses, she responds with some sharp remarks that fall into a familiar pattern of bickering that reveals, to everyone but them, their deep mutual attraction. Mary Testa, delightful as Aunt Eller the show's sardonic commentator, earns a big laugh by telling Curly, "She likes you!" after one vigorous tongue-lashing.

Much of Oklahoma! turns on Laurey's ambivalence -- she's in love with Curly but can't admit it, and is weirdly fascinated with and afraid of Jud, for good reason -- and Jones offers a remarkable reading of a speech that, in my experience, never seemed so central to her character's troubled soul. When Ali Hakim, a traveling peddler, tries to sell Laurey his wares, saying "must be wanting something -- a young, pretty girl like you," she replies, almost snappishly, with a wish list that includes a shoe buckle, a lace dress, and perfume. She doesn't stop there, however, adding with increasing intensity, "Want things! Cain't tell you about -- not only things to look at and hold in yer hands. Things to happen to you. Things so nice, if they ever did happen to you, yer heart'd quit beatin'. You'd fall down dead!" By the speech's end, it is obvious that she isn't your standard musical comedy ingenue, but a complicated young woman driven by yearnings she doesn't fully understand and possessed of a heart and mind that will not be easily given away.

Adding to the volatility of the situation is Patrick Vaill as Jud Fry, the hired hand who yearns for Laurey with an intensity that verges on harassment. (Vaill's handling of Jud's memory of the time he was ailing, and Laurey brought him soup and put a hand on his forehead, checking him for fever, is a remarkable fusing of desire and fury.) Indeed, Jud is a borderline-feral creature, holed up in a shabby smokehouse, poring over risque pictures that give him no pleasure and simmering with resentment at his solitary state. Even in a conventional production of Oklahoma!, Curly's treatment of Jud, his romantic rival, has bullying overtones; Fish stages their encounter, in the smokehouse, in total darkness at first, adding an enormous projection showing Jud's face in closeup. As Curly delivers the slyly satirical "Pore Jud is Dead," Vaill's facial expressions reveal the character's almost unbearable need for affection, accompanied by the dark suspicion that he is being played for a fool. This scene segues into a rendition of "Lonely Room," Jud's howl of rage at the world, here given more than a hint of madness. None of this is arbitrary: Fish is carefully laying the groundwork for the explosion of violence to come in Act II.

Other aspects of the show are treated more conventionally, such as the comic subplot focusing on the magnificently slow-on-the-uptake Will Parker of James Davis and Ali Stroker as that deadpan man magnet Ado Annie. Davis does especially well with Will's inability to hold on to the fifty dollars he needs to obtain Annie's father's permission to marry her; the sight of him trying to do simple calculations in his head -- the light of comprehension breaking through slowly, slowly -- is just about priceless. Stroker's helpless, promiscuous joy in the presence of whatever man happens to be in her orbit provides steady hilarity; in a production designed to frustrate audience applause after each number, she nevertheless gets a big hand for her perfectly innocent, utterly lubricious rendition of "I Cain't Say No." The pair also makes comic hay out of their romantic duel-to-the-finish, "All or Nothin'."

But if this Oklahoma! roils with disruptive emotions and suggestions of brutality, most of the time everyone involved seems to be taking Rodgers and Hammerstein at their word, highlighting the darkness in the script and score. The production features two moments of possible overreach. While it's surely true that Agnes DeMille's original dream ballet wouldn't work in this context, the severely modern dance, set to distorted guitar chords, devised by John Heginbothem for Gabrielle Hamilton as a version of Dream Laurey, is the biggest stylistic departure, and may be a bridge too far for some musical-theatre fans. Heginbothem has dispensed with Dream Curly and Dream Jud, restraining the corps de ballet to the briefest of appearances; to my mind, the piece does the job of dramatizing Laurey's deep-seated psychological dilemma, and one touch -- a series of pairs of boots that fall, one by one, from the flies -- is a powerful metaphor for the character's unresolved feelings about men. But purists, be warned. (Fish has also moved the dream ballet -- for no apparent reason -- from the end of the first act to the beginning of the second, an infelicitous decision that blunts the effect of Act I finale.)

The second change, a significant alteration of the text, is more troubling. In Hammerstein's libretto, Jud crashes Curly and Laurey's wedding, roughs her up, and, in the ensuing clash with Curly, falls on the knife, dying. I won't reveal what happens here, but it significantly alters Curly's role in the death, and it makes the ten-minute improvised trial that follows into an exercise in justice at her blindest. If it is an effective choice, it represents the sort of tinkering with the script that the rest of the production avoids so assiduously. Like it or not, however, it is central to Fish's conception: It cues a reprise of the title tune, sung joyously a few minutes early, that is starkly defiant, yet riddled with guilt. Any sense of optimism -- of American triumphalism -- has been banished to the wings.

In addition, a number of things don't quite work. Ali Hakim, the "Persian" peddler who dallies with Annie, was originally played by Joseph Buloff, a star of the Yiddish theatre, and his lines rang with the comic sound of Second Avenue. When played in straightforward fashion by Michael Nathanson, some of the character's humor is lost. The keys of Laurey's songs have been lowered for Jones, but she still has trouble with the high notes in "People Will Say We're in Love." Overall, in pursuit of a seamless vision, Fish has discounted some of the score's most romantic qualities -- "People Will Say" never builds into a soaring duet for Curly and Laurey, although Daniel Kluger's orchestrations and arrangements give the scores an appealingly contemporary shine. If Jellinek's scenery and Terese Wadden's costumes fit the bill, the lighting, by Scott Zielinski, sometimes includes ugly saturated color washes (especially a hideous green) and Drew Levy's sound design hasn't totally solved the problem of audibility in this challenging space.

Still, this is a starkly original exercise that is well worth your attention -- often musically beguiling, rife with tension, and loaded with laughter. And Fish is getting at something that -- for all of Rodgers' romanticism and Hammerstein's belief in the future -- is undeniably there: Oklahoma! is about to become a state, but what kind of state will it be? A loose society of individual strivers looking for the main chance (the cowboys) or a cooperative society (of farmers) in which everyone pulls together for the good of all? (Not for nothing is the box social designed to raise money for the first decent schoolhouse in the area: Civilization is about to arrive.) If it ends on a far less celebratory note this time around, look around you: We still haven't found the answer to this fundamental question and, right now, it seems farther away than ever. -- David Barbour