 |
Wrinkling Time in a Manhattan Apartment Is there a God? Will science rout nature? Does history fail to teach? Are the ghosts of the dead watching? The award-winning British novelist Kate Atkinson doesn't directly answer these questions in her play "Abandonment," but her unhappy characters muse on them in the lulls between their betrayals of one another and remembrances of hurts past.
Most of the seven actors from the Thirteenth Night Theater Company double in these roles on an attractive set by David Evans Morris. Ms. Atkinson, the author of the recent "Case Histories," a crime novel, has included a murder but the random "Tell-Tale Heart"-like thumpings from the sound system seem unnecessary. As the play, directed by Kit Thacker, who also adapted it from the British version, alternates between present and past, not much changes in the author's Darwinian landscape, not even the sardonic exchanges that pass for comedy: men are brutes, as unfaithful to women now as then; women betray one another; some parents abandon children, while others terrorize them through violence and alcoholism. As Peggy Lee put it: Is that all there is? Not quite. In her final tableau, Ms. Atkinson allows a glimmer of hope. But given the story that precedes it, it's a false one. Veronica Cruz is persuasive
as the Victorian-era governess, though when she scoffs "Latin
shmatin" during one of the character's maundering soliloquies
that pretentiously evoke Shakespeare, the play's title began to sound
like a good idea. - Copyright © 19 April 2005, Andrea Stevens, The New York Times |
Structured
like Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," but with none of its depth,
"Abandonment" involves two sets of characters occupying
the same space: a drawing room in a 19th-century house in Lower Manhattan,
today and in 1885. Elizabeth, the naïve Cinderella-like historian
who has just bought an apartment in the building, is visited by various
people, including two viragos - her adoptive mother and the woman's
daughter - not to mention a ghost with a candle, whom she does not
see. Among the earlier occupants are a philandering lawyer, his shrewish
wife and their children's governess, who falls in love with him.