The Rep dazzles with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”

The play everybody’s talking about right now? A five-time Tony Award winner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently onstage at the St. Louis Repertory Theatre.

As you slowly enter the brilliant, hypersensitive, painfully literal mind of 15-year-old Christopher, words shift. What is familiar becomes strange. Figures of speech seem suddenly silly: “Imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking the person a lot,” he points out, adding that the word “metaphor” is itself a metaphor. He also complains that “people do a lot of talking without using any words,” and a slightly raised eyebrow can either mean disapproval or “I want to do sex with you.” Christopher prefers clarity, and he has no choice but to be honest. Through his eyes, our usual games are revealed as unnecessary or stupid; our lies as cruel.

Yet words are also guides: Christopher makes horrors rational by writing them down. The gruesome death of his neighbor’s dog becomes a case to be solved, a la his hero, Sherlock Holmes. And when Christopher is alone and scared in a strange place, he hears the advice of his teacher and his father, and their words help him manage.

The play’s moments of humor and beauty help the audience manage its own emotional journey. Feeling Christopher’s joy at the blaze of stars and how all the water in the world is connected. Giggling at nonsequitur exchanges. Watching love break through the rigidity of self-enclosure, suspicion, and fear.

The Curious Incident is acted with consummate skill. You can feel the frustration of Christopher’s parents, as they repeat his name in almost every line, a reminder of how hard it is to reach him. “I promise,” they say over and over, trying to breach the gap. Their way of touching him, with fingertips outstretched to meet his for a fleeting second, telegraphs how estranged they feel, knowing they can’t just hug him when they want to, and they can’t expect him to reciprocate their sort of love. It’s easy to see how his obsessions and obliviousness could drive them mad, or force them to put up walls that look hard and cold from Christopher’s side.

And we are, by now, firmly on his side. You can’t help but be intrigued, imagining the hell and heaven of perceiving the world as he does. “I see everything,” he announces. “Most other people are lazy… They do what’s called glancing.” He mocks the fragment of scenery we snatch when we look out a window, compares it to his own Whitmanesque catalog.

Mark Haddon, the author of the book that Simon Stephens adapted into this play, swore it would never work on stage. Now it has swept Broadway, St. Louis has mounted the first of many regional productions, and Brad Pitt has bought the film rights.

Audience members whisper to each other that Haddon must have a son “on the spectrum”; must know someone well… In fact, the play started with an image that flashed into his head—a poodle impaled on a garden fork–which he found darkly funny. (As someone who lives with a standard poodle, I’m trying hard to forgive him.) He started writing a story, and only then did a teenage boy with autism show up to inhabit it. Haddon did very little research to flesh him out—mainly just read Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin. Christopher is a composite of traits Haddon had observed in various individuals who had no diagnosis at all. Once assembled, they led to behavioral problems, so Haddon gave him a few rigid rules to manage the intensity of his experience.

“Labels say nothing about a person,” Haddon wrote in his background notes for The Rep. “They say only how the rest of us categorize that person.”

Unless they’re musicals, plays aren’t usually this brilliantly choreographed, animated throughout by the energy of movement. Stylized, sometimes balletic, sometimes chaotic, it conveys the speed of Christopher’s thoughts and the intolerable disorder of change, transition, breaks in routine. When Christopher wedges himself into trapped space behind the furnace, then slowly climbs until he seems suspended, weightless, his dream of being an astronaut becomes visible to us. Even the tiniest movements, the clenching of Christopher’s hands at moments when the audience wouldn’t even be expected to notice, add to the gestalt.

Music is the next language, with Heavy Metal Ninjas conveying the tumult of London’s streets—and Christopher’s mind—better than any words could. Steve Reich’s minimalism acts as a metronome, pacing out the rhythms that steady him; Beethoven crests the emotion; Bach restores order and clarity.

Light is used just as skillfully, flashing to disorient us, changing color, making the outline of the dead dog’s body glow in the post-intermission darkness.

In the second half, Christopher’s journey is harrowing, and soon it is no longer manageable at all. His mother’s death, its contradiction, and his father’s confession all conspire to destroy his carefully built shelter from the world. The audience agonizes with him, watching him come unglued, lose control, revert to childhood. But by the end, he is restored to strength, his genius shining through.

You leave understanding something that, until now, was only words.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time runs through October 1. Tickets are $18.50–$$89. For more information on the play, including performance times, go to repstl.org.