AmericanTheaterWeb Original News & Reviews

With plays like Reckless and Prelude to a Kiss, Craig Lucas has proven time and again that he can be one of America's most darkly whimsical playwrights. This quality to his writing combines with an historical sweep in The Singing Forest, which opened last night at the Public Theater. While the resulting fantasia about the nature of forgiveness and the impact of the holocaust is continually startling, it never coheres, either dramatically or emotionally, to the point that it becomes satisfying theatergoing.

"Forest" centers on Loë (Olympia Dukakis) an Austrian-born psychiatrist living in New York at the turn of the current century, and the play jets back and forth between Loë's life in the city and her world in Vienna in the years surrounding Hitler's rise to power. Loë's life in both time periods is filled with the stuff of compelling drama. She, her father Martin (Mark Blum) and her brother Walter (Jonathan Groff) are both friends and patients of Sigmund Freud (Pierre Epstein), who's treating her for her hysteria and Walter for his "inversion."

In the latter portion of the twentieth century, Loë, who's no longer practicing, tries to find some sort of replacement for her patients, and turns to working as a phone-sex operator (John Gromada's sound design is ingenious when disguising her voice). As hysterical as this new career choice is, it's also incredibly important plot-wise, because it brings Loë into proximity with both long-estranged relatives and their friends, all of whom end up in Loë's Staten Island home in a moment of high farce.

Who's exactly who, one probably shouldn't say, but it's an intriguing cast of characters, including Jules (the reliable and moving Louis Cancelmi) a young wealthy recluse who's hired Gray (also played by Groff) to visit therapists on his behalf. Two of the men whom Gray sees – Dr. Pfaff (Blum) and Shar Unger (Rob Campbell) have both been involved with Laszlo (Randy Harrison), a young man who's desperate to meet Jules and whose lies about his breakup with Unger have prompted Pfaff to wage a war to discredit his colleague. Alongside these guys are Beth (Susan Pourfar), Gray's girlfriend and a coworker of Laszlo, and Bertha (Deborah Offner), a mysterious woman who spends a lot of time in dark sunglasses at the Starbucks.

That this comedic, albeit emotionally intense, tale of intersecting lives in contemporary New York can brush up, albeit sporadically, again Loë's memories of the early days of Hitler's rise to power and of her long-held secrets about the Holocaust, is a tribute to Lucas' writing. But ultimately, regardless of Lucas' craft and the ways in which the stories share themes and characters, they feel like unhappy and uneasy partners.

The play's bifurcated nature is only exacerbated in Mark Wing-Davey's unevenly conceived staging. With the scenes in New York, there's an edgy, sort of over-caffeinated pacing to the production, but when the play shifts back in time, it seems almost like a set of theatrical brakes has been pulled, and the show jars into a slower, more dreamy realm, certainly appropriate for the action, but theatergoers experience a kind of whiplash nonetheless. And thus, despite some terrifically conceived performances – particularly from Groff and Dukakis – theatergoers watch "Forest" with interest and a bit of skepticism, but never find themselves pulled into the story emotionally.

John McDermott's scenic design – a series of sliding coarse wooden panels that simultaneously bring to mind dingy New York apartments and perhaps German boxcars in the 1930s – proves consistently surprising, and can even become some what hauntingly beautiful under an assured lighting design from Japhy Weideman. Gabriel Berry's costumes capture character and period flair throughout, and ultimately, one can't help but watch in fascination wondering what will come next in either era. At the same time, though, one can't help wish that somehow the play, with its high-charged parallel plots, were somehow more emotionally involving.

---- Andy Propst

The Singing Forest plays at the Public Theater (425 Lafayette Street). Performances are Tuesday at 7pm; Wednesday through Friday at 8pm; Saturday at 2 and 8pm; and Sunday at 2 and 7pm. Tickets are $60-$70 and can be purchased by calling 212-967-7555. Further information, and online ticketing, is available at: www.PublicTheater.org.