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Published on 7/23/08
Video
Survey
When Dostoyevsky’s short novel Notes from Underground hit the scene in 1864, it sounded the opening bell for existential fiction a century before Beckett and Camus gazed into their own personal voids. The work masquerades as the diary of a nameless Underground Man, a neurotic outcast driven to isolation by hypersensitivity to society’s hypocrisy. Reviving his environmental, candlelit production (presented at the 1999 Fringe festival), Michael Gardner offers a rocketing adaptation, but his staging mishandles the source material’s terrifying claustrophobia. Depending too heavily on classical underscoring and a late-in-the-game voiceover, this 90-minute production squanders its carefully constructed air of paranoia.
A scruffy Robert Honeywell gabbles to himself on the floor at our feet, muttering imprecations against toothaches, mathematics and God. At first, Gardner keeps the scenes short by having Honeywell light and then extinguish countless matches, a technique that soon outstays its welcome. The frothing actor, veins throbbing in his temples, peers closely at our faces and flings himself almost into our laps, while four chorus members speak some of the antihero’s internal monologues and embody characters from his memories. Gardner renders the text as a discombobulating cacophony of voices, and Honeywell seems to be forever choking off his own cries for help. But in a piece that depends entirely on mood, tiny errors—an overbearing soundtrack, repetitive directorial gestures—undermine the event. What should be an immersive experience only manages to wade through the shallows of Dostoyevsky’s black pool, indicating mental oppression without truly making us feel it.
—Helen Shaw
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Fri, Feb 29, at 02:29pm
Disagree with this review. The staging serves the play, and it is an inventive and feeling production of a story that, told in a more conventional manner, would have been less striking. Gardner's direction captures the novella and even illuminates aspects of it that aren't as apparent on the page, such as the Man's kernels and illusion of hope and displays of grandiosity that otherwise can get lost amidst the self-attacks that run through the piece. The climax is as striking on stage as it is in the source material and the cyclical nature of this man's torture comes full circle. What really comes across through this production, is how the human condition can be illuminated through the artistic presentation of extremes of behavior and how all of us are connected through the hopes and pain we all experience in life. These realizations make the Brick's "Notes From Underground" a wonderful theatrical experience.
