Points of View

Linked Holocaust stories in Foxborough

by Steve Vineberg

A VIEW FROM THE ROOF By Dave Carley. Based on stories by Helen Weinzweig. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Set design by Steven Capone. Lighting by Deborah Constantine. Costumes by Peg Carbonneau. With Lizbeth Mackay, Cody Nickell, Anne Bates, Charles Stransky, and Karen Murphy. A co-production of Barrington Stage Company and the Orpheum Theatre-Foxborough, at the Orpheum Theatre, Foxborough, Thursday through Sunday through October 4.

In A View from the Roof, the US premiere of which opens the season at Foxborough's Orpheum Theatre, Canadian playwright Dave Carley draws together four short stories from a collection by Helen Weinzweig to tell a tale of the Holocaust. And though the subject has been dramatized many times, this is one tale we haven't heard before. Moreover, its fragmentation into four parts, each set in a different time and offering a different perspective, makes the narrative mysterious and compelling: you can't put it together completely until the final story has been told.

In "The Man Without Memories," which provides an absurdist frame for the evening, an aging Toronto businessman (Charles Stransky) hires two young actors (Cody Nickell and Anne Bates) to move into the building across the street from his office and re-enact his own past while he peers down on them through a pair of binoculars. Their improvisations are prompted by the scenario he provides, but it keeps changing, and eventually you come to realize that he's reinventing his history because he's repressed it. When it returns to him at last, in the form of the concluding story, "The Bridge of Sighs," you understand the relation between the businessman Mulgrave and the characters in the intervening stories, and their relation to one another.

"A View from the Roof" -- from which the evening takes its title -- is presented from the standpoint of a lonely woman (Karen Murphy) in San Juan who allows herself to be picked up by an attractive young painter (Nickell) while her husband attends a psychiatrists' convention. "My Mother's Luck" is a virtual monologue by a German-Jewish émigrée in 1931 Toronto (Lizbeth Mackay) whose daughter (Bates) has elected to return to Europe in search of her estranged father. The daughter lands in Venice in "The Bridge of Sighs" -- by now it's 1938, and she's called Hannah -- in the company of a young man (Nickell), also a Jew, who's posing as her chauffeur.

Carley's main accomplishment as a playwright is in the jigsaw-puzzle construction of the play and his handling of the shifting point of view. As individual pieces, the four episodes are of varying quality. The San Juan story is the weakest, partly because the characters and the dramatic situation feel the most familiar -- though as Mauricio, who flogs other people's bad art to tourists with his name on it, Cody Nickell does an amusing Antonio Banderas imitation. "The Man Without Memories" is a good Pirandellian idea wrecked by clumsy style -- both Carley's and director Julianne Boyd's. While an obsessed Mulgrave views his paid actors, his secretary makes frantic reports on his disintegrating sanity to the chairman of the board. The secretary, a recycled version of several Lily Tomlin creations, is meant to be howlingly funny, but Karen Murphy gives a shrill, self-conscious performance in what seems in any case to be an unplayable role.

Generally, Boyd does her worst work with the actors. Charles Stransky, who gave a grounded, believable performance as the duped client Lingk in the Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross, is wildly off base both as Mulgrave and as the shrink in "A View from the Roof." (And why does he give this Canadian conventioneer an Illinois accent?) Boyd should have spotted the synthetic, play-acting quality that Nickell and Anne Bates bring to "The Bridge of Sighs," a story with so much built-in dramatic tension that it works anyway. The one performer who does solid, emotionally plausible work and establishes a completely convincing character is Lizbeth Mackay as Hannah's émigrée beautician mother in "My Mother's Luck."

"My Mother's Luck," which comes in just before intermission, is the high point of the play, but I think it would benefit from one judicious edit. The daughter, who listens silently, keeps adding, "My mother said," and though I understand how this choice links up with the play's focus on point of view, the device calls too much attention to itself and hamstrings Bates, who has no way of reading this repeated interruption without making it sound like an acting-class exercise. (It's unfair to the actress, whose specific physical work effectively establishes the character of the daughter -- and suggests that she could be much better in "The Bridge of Sighs" with more careful direction.) Besides, those instances of "My mother said" mark the only time all evening that A View from the Roof reminds you of its literary origins. Carley has figured out a way to turn four stories into one drama; it seems perverse that, midway through, he should suddenly opt for reader's theater. n