THEATER

Theater for a New Audience
Isolde - Richard Maxwell

“CRITIC’S PICK: SMASHING…A tale of a romantic triangle where well-heeled people of artistic temperament pursue discreetly dangerous love lives.” – Ben Brantley.

“CRITIC’S PICK: FIVE STARS…The quartet works at an incredible, precise pitch.”

– Helen Shaw, Time Out New York. 

Richard Maxwell’s ‘Isolde’ Explores Primal Instincts

“RIVETING…Inspired.” – Trish Deitch, The New Yorker

“Richard Maxwell is one of the more adventurous theatre artists that this country has produced in decades.” – Hilton Als, The New Yorker

“CRITIC’S PICK: FOUR STARS…Beguiling, hypnotic, beautiful.” – David Cote, Time Out New York

“A stark and unsettling tale of memory, infidelity, and architecture…A must-see for the adventurous theatergoer: mysterious…a structure built with gorgeous severity.” – David Cote, NY1

“Richard Maxwell’s new play is about myth, memory, and a house that never gets built…with characteristically clean lines and meditative pacing.” – Miriam Felton-Dansky, The Village Voice. Click here to read the full review, which appeared in The Village Voice on April 16, 2014, during the run at Abrons Arts Center.

“Highly compelling…Dreamy, stinging, and comic.” – Jacob Horn, Curtain Up

New York City Players’

"Isolde is a new American play about memory, identity, the ephemeral, and infidelity, written and directed by Richard Maxwell, “one of the few truly original experimental theater auteurs.” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times)  In the play, inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the marriage of Patrick and Isolde appears to be happy. Patrick is the owner of a successful construction company and Isolde is a star actress. But Isolde finds herself increasingly unable to remember her lines. When she decides to build her dream house, her husband is eager to help. But the project is jeopardized by Massimo, an award-winning architect whom Isolde hires."

Richard Maxwell looks at the world with X-ray eyes

Watching the plays of this rigorously inventive auteur, we are encouraged to see the plasterboard behind the wallpaper, the skin under the greasepaint and the skulls beneath the skin. Or in the case of “Isolde,” his smashing new work at the Abrons Arts Center, the beams and blueprints — and light and air — that go into the imagining of something as substantial and transitory as a dream house. Or, come to think of it, a play.

 As a director and dramatist, Mr. Maxwell has applied his unnerving vision to many of the popular fictions with which we entertain and explain ourselves: the spy story, the crime caper, the medieval saga and even the western. But with “Isolde,” he has touched down in a world where I somehow never expected to find him.

This tale of a romantic triangle takes place, more or less, in a drawing room, the kind where well-heeled people of artistic temperament pursue discreetly dangerous love lives. As the backdrops for dramas by writers like W. Somerset Maugham and S. N. Behrman, such rooms figured prominently on Broadway during the first half of the 20th century.

Perhaps you’ve seen their like in black-and-white screen adaptations starring Bette Davis and Claude Rains, or Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone, in which concert pianists and heiresses suffer nobly in evening clothes. Sarah Ruhl summoned just such a milieu this season in the play within the play in her “Stage Kiss,” seen at Playwrights Horizons.

But what Ms. Ruhl gave us was a lovingly satirical variation on a hoary anachronism. Mr. Maxwell doesn’t do satire, which isn’t to say he isn’t funny. Instead, he uses an artificial form to explore primal instincts. Since its title character is an actress, you could say that “Isolde” is more directly about the theater than anything Mr. Maxwell has done before.

But those expecting a cozy, high-style soiree of a play should be warned: As the name of this work promises, Mr. Maxwell’s drawing room is big enough to accommodate the mythic passions of Teutonic opera. You will indeed hear strains from Wagner’s “Liebestod” aria before the evening ends.

Of course, that comes after a priceless scene set to the Bob Seger song “Night Moves,” heard from a cellphone. High, low and midrange culture inhabit the same altitude for Mr. Maxwell, whose wonderful “Neutral Hero” (2012) suggested a cross between Homer’s “Odyssey” and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Part of Mr. Maxwell’s point is that all forms of artistic expression stem from the same, inescapably human source.

Our heroine, Isolde (Tory Vazquez), belongs to that breed of commanding actress who inspires religious worship and mad passions. She is also a sensitive plant, prone to neurotic ramblings and cursed by an inability to remember her lines, or even what she’s just said in real life. She is fortunate in having a sturdy, steady husband in Patrick (Jim Fletcher), a building contractor who indulges her caprices and fondly refers to her as “my little short-circuit angel actress.”

Since Isolde’s most recent whim is to have the perfect vacation home, the couple enlist a celebrated architect, Massimo (Gary Wilmes), who talks a great game but never seems to get down to building. This is partly because Massimo soon begins a liaison with Isolde and can’t think of anything else.

Patrick, who is more comfortable with a man’s man like his friend Uncle Jerry (Brian Mendes), appears to object less to the affair than to Massimo’s dubious work ethic and high-flown rhetoric. And as in many of the romantic tragicomedies of long ago, “Isolde” forces its heroine to choose between the pragmatist and the fantasist, between reality and escape.

This being a Maxwell play, the lines aren’t quite that clear cut. We hear that Patrick and Isolde live in luxury, and we have no reason to doubt it. Yet what we see onstage (the set is by Sascha van Riel) is skeletal: a few plywood walls, a platform and several chairs. And, oh yes, a drinks trolley. That’s crucial, as is the immense curtain that can be expanded to display a sylvan lakescape, against which a latter-day Tristan and Isolde might pursue their passion.

The dialogue matches the feeling of a world that is provisional, that might be rolled offstage in a twinkling. Isolde speaks of the feeling of disappearing as she gets older, and in the play’s climactic scene, she announces simply, “I don’t exist.”

Massimo talks largely in abstractions and poses annoying rhetorical questions like: “What is a wall? What is a ceiling?” Patrick, in contrast, is all about graphs and specs and lumber. But Mr. Fletcher’s shrewd, laconic performance suggests that Patrick doesn’t have that much faith in the solidity of material structures.

Mr. Maxwell’s early work, like “House” and “Caveman,” was notable for its starkness of speech and affectless acting style. Like his “Neutral Hero,” “Isolde” is in a more lyrical vein, and the performances tremble on the brink of full, naturalistic emotion.

The cast members are all highly disciplined veterans of New York experimental theater. (Ms. Vazquez, Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Wilmes memorably embodied another triangle in “Gatz,” the Elevator Repair Service’s inspired retelling of “The Great Gatsby.”) And here they make us aware of the inadequacy of everyday speech, the layers within one loud, orgasmic scream and the eloquence of longing within a silence.

The roles that Mr. Maxwell has drawn for them partake equally of the sensibilities of Patrick and Massimo, mixing precisely grounded moments of character definition (watch Mr. Fletcher’s Patrick trying on what he calls “a fat man’s jacket”) and sequences in which identity becomes weightless. All these characters are specifically who they are, but they’re also archetypes, whose ilk have walked the earth for centuries and presumably always will.

Mr. Maxwell nails his male characters, compassionately but firmly; he knows their games and their weaknesses. Isolde is allowed to retain a sense of mystery, even to herself. And if Mr. Maxwell pokes gentle fun at her, he also respects this fading beauty as the embodiment of an ephemeral art.

When she describes the process of acting onstage, in a monologue delivered with an angry poetry by Ms. Vazquez, Isolde speaks of all the floating memories that feed into a specific moment that captures an audience.

“How subtle is the gift of memory?” she asks. “How precious?” And finally, how insubstantial. As Mr. Maxwell reminds us, that’s a large part of the melancholy beauty that makes theater itself so precious.