Theatre in Review: Ode to Joy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)

	Arliss Howard, Kathryn Erbe. Photo: Sandra Coudert

Adele, the central character in Craig Lucas' new play, is such a warmly appealing personality that you might not realize at first that she is a toxic train wreck, destined to drag to the bottom anyone who loves her. On the other hand, she might just save someone's life. That's the paradox at the heart of Ode to Joy, a frequently riveting, if not always extraordinarily lucid, drama about an alcoholic painter and her co-dependent relationships. "This is the story of how the pain goes away," she tells us at the beginning; well maybe, but there's plenty of pain for everybody in this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young boozer.

Following a quick prelude in Adele's studio, Ode to Joy moves, all too appropriately, to a bar where she is eyeing a man who is quietly sobbing on the other side of the room. "Would it help to tell what happened?" she asks him. "Sometimes it helps to just say it; it doesn't seem so terrible." Bill responds that this wife committed suicide while carrying their first child; also, he may have prostate cancer. "But that doesn't vitiate your point," he tells the stunned Adele.

Over the course of four double vodkas for her and an equal amount of whiskey for him, Adele and Bill get to know each other, their moods improving exponentially with each cocktail. The conversation is about art and God, with a big nod to Kierkegaard; a few tabs of Ecstasy are added to the mix, and soon they are giddy with romance and three sheets to the wind. They head back to Bill's place for some more intimate activities, but the proposed encounter collapses in a pile of vomit, shattered glass, and blood. This opening passage, played with extraordinary skill by Kathryn Erbe and Arliss Howard, is a riveting account of two charming people slipping into the mortifying world occupied by sloppy drunks. Normally, when a playwright directs his or her own work, a certain nervousness is indicated, but Lucas' handling of this tricky sequence is superlative.

Interestingly, this sequence is interrupted by a flashback account of Adele's other major love affair, with a pharmaceuticals executive named Mala. Checking out Adele's paintings for possible purchase, Mala is horrified at what she sees, asking, "Do you have something ... without ... uh, dread?" (Trying to make nice, she praises one work. "That's just a primed canvas," Adele says, flatly.) Mala might not like Adele's art, but she is quickly stuck on Adele. During a luncheon date, however, Mala shows alarming signs of ill health; for one thing, she falls forward, smashing her head on the table. We soon learn that Mala needs a heart transplant and is disinclined to do anything about it until Adele forces the issue.

And so it goes, each scene leaping around in time, cutting back and forth across 15 years between Adele's relationships with Bill and Mala as they each turn hopelessly toxic. "I was told not to stare at the wreckage of my past," Adele tells us, but in her case, there is little else to see. A hospital visit goes sour when Mala points out that Adele keeps vodka in her water bottle. In a subplot that could use more fleshing out, Bill gives Adele's stalled career a jump-start by reframing her in the public mind as a religious artist, a turn of events Adele both accepts gratefully and deeply resents. Mala, fed up with Adele's addictions, plots to break up with her on New Year's Eve -- amusingly, once she has ascertained that the Y2K bug is only a hoax. A chastened Adele, now a member of AA, has a pained reunion with Bill; trying to make amends to him, we realize just how horrifyingly wrong things have gone between them.

Each of these scenes is written and acted with plenty of crackle -- Roxanna Hope's willful, domineering, but deeply wounded, Mala is fully equal to her co-stars' performances -- and it may only be as Ode to Joy comes in sight of the finish line that you begin to feel what a lopsided and slightly confounding work it is. Neither Bill nor Mala get fully fleshed out; Bill is plenty addicted himself -- a doctor, he isn't above showing up in the operating room a little tiddly -- and, even given the play's fractured time frame, it's a little odd how Mala is practically at death's door in one scene and ready for a knock-down-drag-out lover's bout in the next. Lucas, who by his own admission has struggled with the bottle and broken relationships, has seemingly poured everything he knows and feels into Ode to Joy without trying to give it a more elegant shape.

Still, there is no more fearless playwright than Lucas, and he has plenty to say about the peculiar difficulties of being an artist and how these can be used to mask, and even justify, the most destructive behaviors. And even his most lacerating insights are accompanied by a hard-won forgiveness that takes the play beyond mere melodrama. By the time he arranges for Adele to meet up one more time with her exes, she is in profound pain, for reasons best not mentioned here, but she is still vitally alive. In addition to three savagely on-target performances, Ode to Joy has a fine production design. Andrew Boyce's set, a raw space with a skylight, easily becomes the bar and various Manhattan apartments as well as a hospital room. Paul Whitaker's lighting and Daniel Kluger's sound are both nicely understated contributions. Catherine Zuber's costumes are uncannily accurate for each character; she smartly dresses Erbe in a way that subtly emphasizes her lack of maturity.

And in Erbe, who made such a big impression earlier in the season in Natural Affection, Lucas has an actress who is as brave as he, as she faces off in one bruising confrontation after another. Adele isn't a mere monster -- she does terrible things, but she also produces profoundly good effects -- and as she gropes her way toward sobriety, he leaves it to us to work out her contradictions. The title isn't ironic; even after terrible suffering, he still believes in the possibility of joy, no matter how hard earned. Ode to Joy isn't Lucas' most fully worked-out or, at times, even coherent piece -- it is too stuffed with ideas that don't get fully pursued -- but it is the most powerful thing he has turned out in years. Clearly, facing his own demons has had a tonic effect on his art. --David Barbour