Notes from Underground

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