Stylization is a weird beast. At its best in a thriller, it can add a feeling of creepiness, inescapable doom, or horror. But when it fails all you’re left with is the disconnect—people acting unnaturally in a way that’s both emotionally alienating and, when it’s really bad, embarrassingly awkward.
So it’s risky, but if there’s any playwright worth the risk, it’s Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss author of such plays as The Physicists and The Visit, which are both absurdly horrific. Stray Dog Theatre’s staging of The Visit comes down to a series of good moments, but overall falls short.
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The play is set in the town of Güllen, which is busted. All of the industry is gone and the people are broke. Their one hope is Claire Zachanassian (Julie Layton) an extremely rich native daughter. She returns and though the townspeople don’t really remember her, or didn’t like her, and essentially ran her out of town when she was 17, they suck up to her in spades in hopes of getting some money.
She promises them 1 billion marks if they’ll do one little favor for her, and right a wrong that she suffered years ago at the hands of one of their townspeople Anton Schill (R. Travis Estes). All they have to do is kill him.
The production is heavily stylized. The actors have their faces painted and powdered, the people move artificially, speak in unison and occasionally say their lines with their back to the audience. While the changes in the townspeople as they consider Clara’s offer are subtly and ominously portrayed with hints of color, the actors performances are too uneven to pull off the stiff, goose-stepping, mass mentality of the townsfolk that director Gary Bell seemingly wants to get at.
The station manager (Stephen Peirick), for instance, fully committed and moved like machinery the entire play. Other characters, like The Bürgermeister (Jan Niehoff), Estes, Layton, and The Teacher (Sarajane Alverson) as principal characters all stayed more human and loose. But most of the other characters sort of drifted between being overly formal and mechanized to being just sort of normal. The change seemed to have no rhyme or reason at all, like the actors merely forgot.
While many of the principal characters were strong, especially Alverson, Layton and Niehoff it was also hard to feel much sympathy or even concern for Anton Schill (R. Travis Estes). He was never quite convincing when he was panicked and antsy. And though the cast did their best, they didn’t always seem quite at home with the German words retained from the original translation/adaptation of the play, which only made the performance that much less convincing.
Due to a weak cast (barring a few exceptions), this thrilling, macabre play of the absurd turned into something disappointingly mediocre.
