From
The New York Times
November
20, 2002
By
BRUCE WEBER
“Signals
of Distress,” a 1995 novel by Jim Crace, is an unlikely candidate for
adaptation to the stage. The novel is set in 1830 in an isolated and
weather-buffeted town on the coast of northern England, a place so often
fogbound that it seems literally hidden from the world. In addition, with its
period vernacular and social decorum, what Mr. Crace rendered most scrupulously
and deliciously is the sense of a place that feels uniquely remote. In other
words, the strengths of the novel do not suggest the strengths of the theater.
The movies, maybe, for the lush atmospherics, for the desolate scenery, for the
power inherent in casting and close-ups. (Faces alone can entertain and
inform.)
On
the stage, though – especially Off Off Broadway, where space is limited and
effects are restricted by low budgets – you wouldn't ordinarily see this kind
of eerie emptiness credibly exploited. But that's precisely what is
accomplished in the modest, lovely and resourceful new rendering of “Signals of
Distress” at the SoHo Rep.
The
show was created and is performed by a Brooklyn-based, Jacques Lecoq-influenced
troupe, the Flying Machine. It has been performing since 1996, but I hadn't
seen its work before, and my understanding is that “Signals of Distress” is
more verbal and narratively straightforward than some of its previous projects.
Even so, the company's emphasis on movement and mime, sound and light, simple,
suggestive
props
and other stage illusions is equal to any reliance on plot and dialogue.
Many
in the versatile and winning cast of eight double or triple in roles that
include a dog and cattle. And the director, Joshua Carlebach (who also wrote
the script), has a fine creative eye for unpretentious, seductive stage
pictures.
Mr.
Crace’s novel tells the story of a serendipitous collision of cultures. When a
rugged storm beaches two ships on the outskirts of Wherrytown, bringing to a
wary
community
a self-important and foolishly pedantic businessman from London and a boatload
of American sailors, what results is an eccentric comedy of manners, though
with several consequences that are not comic at all. Mr. Crace writes with
idiosyncratic humanity and shrewd omniscience; his forays into the perspectives
of the characters are often deadpan and wisely observant at once.
From
the start of the Flying Machine production, however, the story is less
compelling for its own sake than it is as a frame for the company’s stylistic
drapery. With the minimal wooden props configured into footbridges, a
rough-hewed inn and a ship's hull rocked by the sea, Mr. Carlebach has
convincingly created a town that is its own whole world.
Augmenting
the illusion is music both recorded (I thought I heard the strains of a
Beethoven symphony) and live (one of the actors, Kevin Varner, is a folk-dance
fiddler), and lighting that is both simple and evocative.
Most
prominently there is a series of gauzy scrims across the stage, through which
the audience views the play, and which function to render the town air
mist-thick, the visibility hazy. The scrims also serve to layer the action of
the play, helping to inform the audience that some scenes are being recalled
from the past, set at a physical distance from the characters in the forefront,
or even dreamed. The play’s designers – Marisa Frantz (set), Bill Ware (sound),
Theresa Squire (costumes) and Josh Bradford and Raquel Davis (lighting) – have
all done sharp, ingenious work.
The
dreamer is the play’s central character, Aymer Smith, a London soap
manufacturer without a head for his own business but with an insistent nose in
everyone else's. A virgin in middle age, a man of pretentious manners and a
nonstop talker whose highfalutin patter drives everyone to yearn to be out of
his presence, Aymer is played by Richard Crawford with an entertaining grasp of
the man's irritating qualities, but he still manages to elicit our compassion
for his painful loneliness.
Other
deft portrayals are turned in by Mr. Varner as a laconic handyman (he doubles
as Aymer’s short-tempered brother and business partner, Matthias) and Kathryn
Philip, who plays two townswomen – one fun loving, the other frightened – whose
personalities reflect their diametrically opposed responses to the perpetually
threatening loneliness of life in Wherrytown.
But
it is also true that every member of the Flying Machine is an essential
contributor to the striking and satisfying theatricality of “Signals of
Distress,” a show whose story is borrowed but whose delights are its own. This
is the art of adaptation.
SIGNALS
OF DISTRESS
Created
and performed by members of the Flying Machine; adapted by Joshua Carlebach
from the novel of the same name by Jim Crace; directed by Mr. Carlebach;
lighting by Josh Bradford and Raquel Davis; set by Marisa Frantz; costumes by
Theresa Squire; sound by Bill Ware; production stage manager, Sloan Edenfield;
stage manager, Courtni Wisenbaker. Presented by SoHo Rep, 46 Walker Street,
TriBeCa.
WITH:
Richard Crawford, Matthew Gray, Jessica Green, Jason Lindner, Kathryn Philip,
Gregory Steinbruner, Tami Stronach and Kevin Varner.
© The New York Times 2002