Freshwater

SITI Company’s Freshwater is the theatrical equivalent of cotton candy: all spun-sugar brightness wrapped around thin air. It’s roughly as nourishing, and as headache-inducing. Virginia Woolf wrote her only extant play as a parlor piece to amuse her Bloomsbury peers with a mild lampoon of their Victorian elders, including Woolf’s aunt, photo pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron. On the page, the satire is brittle and gossamer-slight, if inarguably fascinating as a glimpse of the novelist’s lighter side; onstage, in its U.S. premiere, director Anne Bogart and her tireless, tight-knit ensemble have turned it into an effortful, galumphing goof.

On designer James Schuette’s diorama-like set of a sunny atelier, Cameron (Ellen Lauren) plays twittering hostess to a floating salon of mostly bearded, self-important nitwits. George Frederick Watts (Barney O’Hanlon) totes his painter’s palette and frets over symbolism; Alfred Lord Tennyson (Stephen Duff Webber) gushingly rereads his own poetry; Cameron’s dotty husband (Tom Nelis) can’t seem to keep his pants on. Only budding actor Ellen Terry (Kelly Maurer) aspires to a “place where people talk sense.”

While there is no small degree of joy in witnessing this crack ensemble cut loose (Lauren’s windup-toy strut and Webber’s droll solipsism are especially delicious, to a point) the insistently farcical tone, imposed on a text with so few actual jokes, soon becomes assaultive. Woolf dubbed the play an “unbuttoned, laughing evening,” but SITI’s belabored approach turns a forced smile into a rictus.—Rob Weinert-Kendt

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