Strange Interlude (review)

The imagery that opened director Michael Kahn's 2012 production of Strange Interlude at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harman Hall (the larger of the troupe's two Washington, DC, venues) was strikingly modern. The stuffy, classics-filled library of Nina Leeds's professor father was nowhere to be seen; instead, Walt Spangler, designer of Robert Falls's recent Desire Under the Elms at Chicago's Goodman Theatre and on Broadway, filled the stage with a tall, sleek cube, set on an angle. Kahn's opening sequence utilized video to show Nina's backstory, the World War I aviation accident that killed her now-idealized lover, Gordon. Black-and-white archival footage was projected against Spangler's high walls, creating a cinematic effect as the plane lost control. The image almost immediately turned theatrical as Francesca Faridany, playing Nina, appeared near center stage, illuminated by the projection. Faridany sank to the floor in tandem with the plane spiraling to the ground, culminating in explosive noise rumbling through the hall.

Kahn and projection designer Aaron Rhyne continued to use projections between the scenes (which O'Neill labeled as the drama's nine acts—Kahn calls his condensation a three-act affair), with more archival footage washing over the set during transitions to remind the audience of the progressing periods and new locations. Yet the production was anything but tech-oriented or visually busy. As its three hours and forty-five minutes unfolded, it was remarkable to observe how much faith Kahn placed in O'Neill's text, which he condensed from its original five hours with dinner break. There was precious little clutter within scenes—no underscoring, only minor shifts of lights on Spangler's walls (slight emotional coloring, mainly grays and greens), and only the most essential furniture (three chairs and a table for the professor's library, for instance). The edit itself, as Kahn called it ("We wish to acknowledge that the text has been edited by the director, with huge admiration for the author, and in hopes that he would approve," read the program note) was deft, focusing on streamlining, not rearrangement. The play, though shortened, was indeed O'Neill's.

The cast handled the famous asides subtly, indicating interior thought by only a slight turn of the head, a shift in intonation, sometimes less. The performers quickly made clear that the asides would not be underlined and that the audience would be called on to keep up as the monologues and dialogue sped along. The pace was brisk but not forced, and the snappy tempo surely contributed to the common reception of Faridany's Nina as Katharine Hepburn-esque. Faridany has the lean silhouette and upturned chin of Hepburn in her heyday, but it was the vocal performance that demanded the comparison. Perhaps because she was born and now lives in the United States and was raised in the United Kingdom, patrician pronunciations tripped lightly off Faridany's tongue. As often as possible, her outer Nina was bright and breezy, easily plausible as the female magnet keeping Charles Marsden, Sam Evans, and Ned Darrell tightly in her grip. Nina's siren capabilities were made utterly clear when, in O'Neill's sixth act, Faridany—by then having amply displayed Nina's vacillations between confidence and dusky emotional

Fig. 1.

Robert Stanton as Charles Marsden and Francesca Faridany as Nina Leeds in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Strange Interlude, directed by Michael Kahn. Photo by Scott Suchman.

despair—entered in a slinky dress as red-orange as her hair. The gown showed off her shoulders and arms and was layered by longtime O'Neill costume designer Jane Greenwood to look like nothing so much as flames. The audience gasped at the sight.

Kahn, who chose this project as a present to himself for twenty-five years of running the Shakespeare Theatre Company, clearly felt a bit of showmanship would not compromise the dense psychological component that drew him to...