Strongarmed

Edelstein's Shaw goes over the top

by Steve Vineberg

ARMS AND THE MAN< By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Barry Edelstein. Sets designed by Narelle Sissons. Costumes by Kaye Voyce. Lighting by Rui Rita. With Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Dundas, Christopher Evan Welch, Rebecca Creskoff, Deborah Rush, Steven Gilborn, and Michael Gaston. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, through August 3.

Eric Stoltz brings much charm to the role of Captain Bluntschli, the "chocolate-cream soldier" of Shaw's Arms and the Man in the current revival at Williamstown. Bluntschli is a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs against the Bulgarians. Escaping from gunfire in the Bulgarian countryside, he scales the balcony of a mountain estate and lands in the bedroom of a swoony young woman whose father and fiancé are fighting on the front. She hides him and feeds him chocolates. (They're his passion; he carries them -- like all professional soldiers, he says -- into war instead of bullets). Bluntschli is Shaw's affectionate parody of a Swiss pragmatist, level-headed and unemotional; it amuses Shaw to discombobulate him by placing him, initially, in a situation where his reasonableness can't help him much. Stoltz underplays with panache, alternating between the irony he's displayed in movies like Kicking and Screaming and a dry, Stan Laurel-ish buffoonery.

But in this Arms and the Man, only Stoltz gets to do any underplaying. I understand that Shaw wanted to pit Bluntschli's realism against the high-flown romanticism of Raina Petkoff, the woman whose boudoir he infiltrates (her notions of love are based on opera), and the object of her adoration, the vain Bulgarian major Sergius Saranoff. But director Barry Edelstein's idea of a heightened style is the kind of furious overacting that would be embarrassing in a college production. He gets his actors to whirl around the stage, tumble backward onto divans, and flash their eyes while declaiming their lines -- none of which would work even if Edelstein were less clumsy at stage business than he is. Watching his version of Shaw's ingenious trifle of a play, I felt sorry for the actors, especially Jennifer Dundas as Raina. Dundas can be very convincing as a naturalistic actress, but she has no idea how to play high comedy (she was limp and affected in the New York production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia), and what she's asked to do here seems calculated to make her look bad.

Rebecca Creskoff doesn't come off much better in the role of the proud servant girl Louka. As the grandstanding Sergius, Christopher Evan Welch manages maybe one funny moment out of every three or four flourishes; and Welch is at home with high style -- he gave a seasoned performance in the Roundabout Theatre's revival of London Assurance a couple of months ago. Of the supporting cast, the only truly relaxed performer is Deborah Rush as Raina's mother (and her co-conspirator in the plot to keep Bluntschli's appearance a secret). But then, Rush is an actress who always comes through; she has the kind of comic timing most performers would kill for.

Edelstein staged All My Sons at Williamstown last summer, a production I caught when the Roundabout remounted it this spring, and though I can appreciate his fondness for an all-out theatrical approach to classic texts, his ideas elude me, especially the visual ones. He began All My Sons by having the industrialist dream of the planes he'd fitted with defective parts during the war (which caused the deaths of several young pilots); Edelstein depicted the character's thoughts by hanging little prop airplanes from the flies that flew up when he awoke from his guilty nightmare. The effect was like something in an Ed Wood movie.

Nothing in Arms and the Man is quite as silly as that, but Kaye Voyce's costumes are designed to comment unflatteringly on the characters (again, it's the actors who suffer -- especially Creskoff and Welch), and Narelle Sissons's otherwise handsome set is bizarrely decorated with stars and quarter-moons -- presumably to remind us that these opera-hooked Bulgarians have stars in their eyes. Opera blasts through the house speakers at the beginning of each of the three acts, though I think Edelstein might have trusted the audience to get the point the first time. This is a production that grabs your arm and assures you, over and over, that it's the most hilarious thing you've ever seen. I was worn out by the first intermission.