Theatre

The great Brazilian playwright, Nelson Rodrigues, dipped his pen deep into the darkest veins of human nature. Here, in 1950s Rio, a husband and son are locked in perpetual mourning, zealously abetted by a pair of spinster aunts. Only brother Patricio refuses the family fable, stewing his hatred for his dead sister-in-law in a brew of booze and bad women, until he hatches a poisonous plan with one of them. Geni nurses an obsession of her own, convinced she will die of the disease that felled Herculano’s wife, and the prostitute’s passionate imprecations soon vanquish the widower’s sexless solitude.

The clean elegance of StoneCrabs Theatre’s earlier Rodrigues revivals is beautifully in evidence on the Union’s stage, under the incisive eye of director Kwong Loke. Ruth Posner and Laura Arantes are superbly cast as the vituperative aunts, eking precious comedy from their arid coupling, and Patrick Ross is an impressively boorish Patricio.

The lurid love of Geni and Herculano never finds adequate footing in Najlla Kay and Natan Barreto, however. Partly, the problem lies in the translation, stippled with too many contemporary flourishes to adequately convey the claustrophobic social strictures of the setting. And if Herculano’s tumble into Geni’s tired, stained bed seems precipitous, his puritanical son’s is barely credible. There’s much to admire in this bold, poetic staging, but, ultimately, the crazed, excessive flights of Rodrigues’s meditation on obsession fail to ignite fully.