They Prohibited the Wrong Thing in the 20s


Reviewed 3/11/05

Damon Dering is approaching a deified status in this town. His Nearly Naked Theatre often seems incapable of doing anything wrong. Even when he steps into more conservative companies and traditional offerings, he makes some impressive choices. But just as Spielberg had his Hook and David Ira Goldstein his For Better or Worse, so it goes with Dering, whose work four out of five times is spectacular, and his current Les Liaisons Dangereuses falls into that unfortunate fifth time. It is not from a lack of choices that Dering’s productions ever suffer, but rather ill-advised ones, and Dering’s central conceit of moving the play from the tumultuous 1780s to the jazz-infused 1920s is as illogical as it is badly researched. Replacing the rigid social stratification of pre-Revolutionary France with the flapper and the threat of a guillotine with a stock market crash (which didn’t affect France nearly as much as it did us silly Americans since Europe never really economically recovered from World War I; a move to the 1930s would have been more appropriate) is a weakening of emotional power. Directing his actors to turn their characters into broad clowns through silent film style acting in the first act and then pouring on the melodrama late in the show undercuts any potential for audience involvement.

It’s hard to sneakily admire the wicked Marquise (Andrea Pruseau pictured right middle) and the vain Valmont (Joe Kremer also pictured right middle) when they are nothing but over-emoting buffoons. It’s impossible to feel empathy for the doomed de Tourvel (Kerry McCue) when she falls for such moustache-twirling villains. I know these strong actors are capable of much more, so I can place blame nowhere else but at the feet of Dering’s stylistic choices. The decision to have Kremer and Pruseau wink at the audience (sometimes literally!) rather than trusting them to appreciate the subtlety of their character’s machinations is the central error that makes it hard to sit through this lengthy misstep.

Most everyone is pushed to this exaggeration, from Courtney Weir’s (pictured above on right) overtly idiotic Cécile through Johanna Carlisle’s snarlingly grasping Volanges to the hammy scene setting announcements by Richard Wells. Everyone seems to have been told to go for the quick laugh. Their problem is not bad acting, but rather doing as they were told. It is only Kim Parmon’s situation-setting and imaginative dance sequences sprinkled throughout the piece that show any spark of the truly on-target.

The show looks beautiful on T. John Weltzien and Gregory Jaye’s Deco inspired, three-panel set and dressed in Terre Steed’s wonderful costumes, from his Marlene Dietrich-influenced outfit for Pruseau to the flapper numbers for Laura Anne Kenney’s slutty Émilie, even if it is hard to see them with Nykol De Dreu’s inexplicable heavy use of side-lighting that leaves the actors with half-moons of faces walking through strips of darkness.

It breaks my heart to talk about a Dering creation in this way. I respect choices, no matter how out-of-control, so much more than non-choices. Unfortunately, I just can’t recommend a show so wrongheaded. If you’re looking for an updated version of Liaisons, rent the DVD of Cruel Intentions instead.

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