Belleville
Through Nov. 12 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Written by Amy Herzog. Directed by Anne Kauffman. Scenic Designer: Julia C. Lee. Costume Designer: Mark Nagle. Lighting Designer: Nina Hyun Seung Lee. Sound Designer and Composer: Robert Kaplowitz. Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Alex Ripp. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire. Fight Directors: Rick Sordelet and Jeff Barry. Stage Manager: Gina Noele Odierno.
Belleville opens like Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, with newlyweds indulging the glories of their own cool apartment. Except there’s stuff about masturbation. Belleville closes like an Ionesco play, with an awful lot of attention being paid to the furniture. Except a very disturbing human tragedy has happened. In the middle, Belleville plays like an early 20th century melodrama, in which everyone has dark ulterior motives and everytime a knife is brandished—to cut bread, mostly—someone comments on how menacing it seems.
Except that Belleville’s chills and thrills come from everyday, present-day anxieties like establishing yourself in a career and a relationship when you’re in your 20s, or losing a parent at a sensitive time, or wondering where the rent’s going to come from.
The main characters in Belleville reek with that all-American air of entitlement and superiority. They’re smug, self-centered, oblivious to the problems they’re causing others and grotesquely wrapped up in themselves. This is a play of constant conflicts: internal, external, cultural, psychological and epidermal.
The Yale Repertory has offered more than its share of bleak relationship dramas in the last few years. That’s because it premieres more new works by young playwrights than any other theater in New England. Belleville offers a new fashion of bleakness (bleak is the new black), and I won’t say it’s unwelcome. Like everyone from Dostoevsky to Edward Albee to David Adjmi to Lucinda Coxon (all of whom have been produced at the Rep in recent years), Herzog explores the disintegration of a relationship, showing how the “lovers” have been living a lie.
But Belleville is much more dramatic, or rather melodramatic, than a simple unraveling of a relationship. Herzog wants to show you the hopelessness and rage that can spiral out of the stresses of everyday living, but she really cares about raising the entertainment value of the experience. Belleville is funny. It’s suspenseful. It’s mock-shocking, then genuinely horrifying. It’s weird yet real. It’s old-fashioned yet current and immediate. It’s ironic yet earnest. You can read multiple metaphors into it—America’s attitude about the rest of the world, maturity and regression in Millenial Generation, the need for romance—geographically or personally—and the desire to micro-manage that romance until it’s just another consumer commodity.
You might wonder how on earth any actor can play such scattered material. The Rep’s cast shows just about every option. As Abby, a frank and frustrated young woman trying to kick the anti-depressants she’s been taking since her mother died, Maria Dizzia strips herself emotionally bare, erupting regularly into hysteria which somehow stops short of histrionics. As her husband Zack, Greg Keller takes a different tack, starting with a stoner-dude stereotype then adding humanity gradually. As their mature-beyond-their years landlords, Gilbert Owuor and Pascale Armand watch silently and react in a variety of ways. Yet everyone is hiding true feelings, or feels powerful or controlled by others.
Happy Halloween. That yuppie couple living in seemingly idyllic bliss is haunted beyond your worst nightmares. Not everybody will have the stomach for Belleville, but at least it scaring up some new styles for the Theater of Codependent Despondency.
Having seen the show last night and still processing, trying to figure out what I thought and how I felt about it, Chris, I must say, this review was really helpful. Your insights are clarifying —and edifying— and now my thoughts and feelings are settling. And that’s a relief because I don’t want to spend any more time with those characters!! Thanks, blt
I thought how the story unspooled along with the couple’s life was really well-done. The suspense developed very nicely: in the 1st scene I just felt something was “off” about the way both of them were acting and as the play progressed, more and more antennae started going up so that by the last time that chef’s knife makes an appearance, I didn’t know what was going to be done with it- anything was possible by then. I’ve known some people who were delusional and, crazy as Zack and Abby seemed by the end, they didn’t strike me as untrue.
After reading this review, I can better understand why Amy Herzog set her drama in France and cast the Senegalese landlord rather than a French one. However, I still have major problems with some of the dialogue that is less than believable and the problem with understanding the French spoken by the landlord and his wife in the last scene. Too much is revealed too late for this theatergoer.
er det ikke en langt n tenke sosiale medier har spilt en betydelig rolle i trend.She avviser den linere ideen om fremskritt og tilbyr et alternativ.