Theatre in Review: I Am the Wind (The Shop/59E59)

	Louis Butelli, Christopher Tierney. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima

The title of Jon Fosse's play is honesty itself; you won't find a windier evening of theatre in town at the moment. In I Am the Wind, a pair of ill-defined characters set sail on a sea of vagueness for an undefined destination to an unclear resolution. Their conversation consists entirely of abstract musings about Life and Death, expressed in astonishingly banal language. Fosse, a Norwegian, has been acclaimed in Europe. I have to believe that something has been lost in translation.

Or maybe not; I Am the Wind has been adapted by Simon Stephens, himself a playwright of note in the UK. Unless he has willfully stripped the original dialogue of the tiniest specificity, his work must be in full accord with Fosse's intentions. Clearly, whatever the play is about is for them to know and for you to find out.

That is, of course, if you can. There are two characters in I Am the Wind: The One and The Other. The former is handsome and athletic, brooding in a faintly Byronic way; as played by Christopher Tierney, who is dressed in jeans and a sailor sweater, with bare feet and wildly tousled hair, he is a fashion editor's dream of existential angst, a soul in torment brought to you by the Gap. His companion, played by Louis Butelli, is older, slighter of frame, with thinning hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a scarf wrapped around his neck as a protection against the ocean breeze. I dwell on these details because the casting and costume choices do far more than anything in the text to distinguish the two characters.

It's a wonder that their boat doesn't sink, so heavy is it with weighty, portentous dialogue, written in the kind of blank verse that emphasizes broken lines and incessant repetition. The One, who is clearly suffering some kind of deep-seated misery, says, "I can't bear the noise/I can't bear the noise people make/ I can't bear the noise of everything," adding, "I turn into a rock/And it gets/The rock/Gets heavier and heavier/I get so heavy that I can barely move/So heavy that I/That I sink/Down and down/Down under the sea/I sink/Down to the bottom/And then/I just lie there/At the bottom of the sea/Heavy/Motionless."

By this point, I was feeling a little heavy and motionless myself. Anyway, The Other, not wanting to cede the stage entirely, gets in on the action, and they take part in a kind of verbal Ping-Pong. The One: "I'm a concrete wall/That's breaking into pieces." The Other: "That must hurt." The One: "Of course it hurts." The Other: "It must really hurt." The One: "It does." The Other: "All you are/Is a concrete wall/That's breaking into pieces." The One: "And falling apart/Falling into rubble." The Other: "You're rubble." The One: "No, I'm breaking/No not that either." This goes on for some time until The One says, "It's just words." You're telling me.

As the current revivals of No Man's Land and Waiting for Godot make clear, obfuscatory language can be used to create an atmosphere of tension and menace. (Humor helps, too; I Am the Wind is deadly -- and I mean deadly -- serious.) A more recent example is Debbie Tucker Green's Born Bad, a drama about a family rent by a terrible crime that draws much of its power from the refusal to name the act in question. But to build an entire play out of allusion and repetition, using language lacking in any suggestive power, is the theatrical equivalent of going sailing, during a storm, in a leaky dinghy; you can't be surprised if it capsizes.

Cast as The One, Christopher Tierney, heretofore best known as the victim of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark's most spectacular injury, shows that he has real acting chops, even if most of what he has to say makes little or no sense. He partners well with Louis Butelli as The Other. Their relationship is open to interpretation -- Are they friends? Brothers? Lovers? -- and trying to parse it provides this meager piece with a touch of interest. Paul Takacs' direction is, at least, fast-moving, although he has obtained a set design from Steven C. Kemp -- consisting of layers of swagged muslin in a palette ranging from white to gray -- that is possibly more drab than necessary. Takacs also directs the actors to use a single prop -- a long, thick nautical rope -- in various awkward ways. When the men share a drink, they appear to sip from the rope. When they share a meal, they gnaw on it. A little of this goes a long, long way. The other contributions, including Amanda Shafran's costumes, Nick Solyom's lighting, and Palmer Heffernan's sound, are perfectly acceptable.

I Am the Wind ends with an unexplained event, which may or may not be The One's suicide; at any rate, he is still talking. Another play by Fosse, A Summer's Day, which played at Rattlestick Theatre Company last year, also dealt with a misadventure at sea. It was no more illuminating. As I noted earlier, Fosse's works have earned acclaim in certain quarters, including, on this shore, The New York Times. Why this is so may be, to my mind, the biggest mystery of all.--David Barbour