Theatre in Review: The Events (New York Theatre Workshop)

	Clifford Samuel. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Several years ago, New York Theatre Workshop presented Columbinus, a documentary play about the notorious Colorado school shooting, which some reviewers found to be exploitative, an unnecessary wallow in grim details. Now NYTW presents The Events, which focuses on a similar, if fictional atrocity, and nobody is going to accuse it of sensationalism; if anything, David Greig's drama with music is undermined by its natural reticence and good taste. Appalled by Anders Breivik's killings in Norway a couple of years ago -- Breivik, enraged by his country's liberal values, gunned down 77 people at a youth camp -- Greig has worked hard to create a piece that strikes at the heart of such crimes without rubbing our faces in wholesale slaughter. Instead, The Events opens with a choir filing on stage, gathering around a piano, and singing the Carpenters hit "Top of the World." It's a choice that, quite justifiably, leaves us wondering exactly what sort of play we are going to see.

The confusion is not quickly relieved. The director, Ramin Gray, creates a striking tableau early on as Neve McIntosh, playing Claire, an Anglican priest, greets the members of the choir. Standing apart from this friendly, chatty crowd is a grim-faced stranger (Clifford Samuel), whom Claire tries to coax into joining in. His flat affect is immediately disturbing, and one's fears are not allayed as he slips into a monologue that imagines an indigenous Ghanaian youth, a few centuries ago, watching from a cliff as European ships arrive, bringing with them "instruments of objectification and violence that are about to be unleashed on his people."

This is the first of many gambits that tend to make The Events into an unnecessarily murky experience. It soon becomes clear that the choir has been attacked by a lone gunman, leaving an unknown number of them dead. Given the above speech, and the fact that Samuel is black, one can be forgiven for thinking that Greig has imagined some kind of third-world act of retribution. Instead, the unnamed killer is an Anders Breivik type, a white racist who is equally disgusted by multiculturalism and desperate for attention. ("If I'm going to leave a mark on the world, I have to do it now," he warns at one point.) Claire, who hid in a closet with one of her singers, was terrorized by the killer; announcing he had only one bullet remaining, he left it to them to choose who should die.

What follows is a kind of Socratic dialogue, an attempt to answer the question "Is he mad or is he evil?" Her interlocutors, all played by Samuel, include her worried female partner; a psychiatrist and a journalist, neither of whom offers any insight; and the head of a UKIP-style political party, who only wants to distance himself from the fact that the killer was a former member. She finally confronts the killer himself, in the rare scene in The Events that packs any real tension. Greig's determination not to flood the stage with violence and melodrama is admirable, but it goes too far: By stripping out all the details of the event -- the number of the dead, their personalities, the impact of the violence on the surrounding community -- he removes any trace of humanity, abstracting this terrible tragedy into something that has no reality at all. Ultimately, the best Greig can do is to suggest that evil -- real, unrepentant, and utterly destructive -- a mystery, as is the heroic goodness displayed by Claire when facing the end of a gun.

The presence of the choir is both welcome and a terrible distraction. New York Theatre Workshop has been assigned the task of finding a different choir for each performance of The Events -- a remarkable feat of coordination -- and, at the performance I attended, the group chosen performed beautifully, especially a haunting rendition of "How Great Thou Art." But when, in two different sequences, members of the choir pepper Claire with questions, reading their lines flatly from pieces of paper, the effect is to further distance us from the drama at hand. Although they share the stage, McIntosh and Samuel share one world -- of skilled theatrical artifice -- and, for all their vocal skills, the singers inhabit another world entirely, which has no connection to Claire and the terrible events that have driven her to the brink.

McIntosh is a striking presence, gifted with a sharp profile, eyes that radiate with quiet fury, and a voice that makes it clear that fools will not be suffered gladly; she gives Claire a fiercely questioning quality as she struggles to hold onto her faith in the face of overwhelming evil. She makes Claire's torment seem thoroughly plausible. Samuel doesn't do much to differentiate the many characters he is given to play, which leads to a certain amount of muddle. At times, I wasn't clear to whom she was speaking. But as the killer, he cuts a disturbing, enigmatic figure; you can see why he haunts Claire's dreams.

The production features a bare-bones design. Chloe Lamford's set is basically a bare stage with some risers, and an upstage curtain that rises during the opening number. Charles Balfour's lighting relies on general stage washes with a few more specific looks, for example, flooding the stage with deeply saturated red to suggest the massacre is about to begin.

Certainly Greig has tackled some mind-bendingly difficult material, and he certainly earns points for trying to frame it in a fresh, and thoroughly theatrical, manner. Also, the idea of such grotesque violence erupting out of solidly liberal Western Europe is a powerful and provocative one. But the end result is dull, a moral debate that exists outside the flesh-and-blood world. The Events is a play about an outrageous act, but it fails to outrage, or even engage.--David Barbour