The Moors - Entropy Theatre Company
Pictured: Robin Abrahams and Debbie Aboaba
The Moors – Entropy Theatre Company
Review by James Wilkinson
This piece also appeared on Edge Media Network
The Moors is presented by Entropy Theatre Company. Written by Jen Silverman. Directed by Joe Juknievich. Lighting Design: Luke Lewkowicz. Costume Design: Daisy Walker. Dramaturg: Jo Michael Rezes.
I suspect that the audience around me at Entropy Theatre Company’s production of The Moors wasn’t quite sure what to do with the characters they were seeing on stage. When the company of actors first appears in their Victorian costumes, it’s in a slow solemn procession. They dutifully march in from the aisles, accompanied by the string section of some unseen orchestra playing the score for an old movie epic. Faced with such an opening, what can you expect but some highbrow literary adaptation a la the BBC? Then the actors open their mouths to speak and that’s when the feeling that you’ve landed in the Twilight Zone beings to creeps in. There’s a tilt of the head and a pitch in the voice that positions these characters just a few degrees off center. A quiet insanity bubbles behind the lines, always threatening to break the dam that’s keeping things respectable. Faced with this kind of arched character study, the audience seemed hesitant to let themselves go, with some members only indulging in the show’s biggest laugh lines. It’s a shame that they limited themselves to a fraction of what was on the stage. There’s a lot of nutty fun in Entropy Theatre’s production which had me snorting into my hand for much of the evening. The script by Jen Silverman tosses a lot of different ingredients into the blender and Entropy Theatre’s production manages to pluck out just enough gems to keep it consistently enjoyable.
If the title, The Moors is pinging some distant memory in the back of your brain, that’s because it would have come up in your high school English class when discussing the Bronte sisters. Wuthering Heights, the sole novel by middle sister Emily Bronte takes place on the English moors, depicting them as a remote, brutal no-man’s-land. Her characters, isolated in this landscape are unable and seemingly unwilling to control their wild emotions and passions. The Moors, the play, is a riff on the sensibilities found in that novel and in the novels of Emily’s sisters Charlotte and Anne. Here, we’re stuck on the desolate moors, in a grand old estate house inhabited by a pair of sisters, Huldey and Agatha (Kayleigh Kane and Kris Kim). Agatha rules over the house with a grim countenance while Huldey, the more, (let’s be kind and say) delicate, sister has an obsession recording her thoughts in her diary. Their brother Branwell also resides in the house (or does he?) as do a slew of identical maids each charged with caring for different rooms and identifiable only by the medical condition they’re suffering from. A new governess, Emilie (Debbie Aboaba), has been brought in from London, but as Huldey points out to her sister, there is nothing for her to govern. So what’s she doing there? Meanwhile, the family dog, Mastiff (Ryan Lemay) is busy having an existential crisis before falling in love with one of the moor-hens (Sydney Grant) running around the grounds.
Because Emilie is the outsider coming into this environment, I suppose that by default she becomes the audience surrogate. We learn to navigate this strange world as she does. But while Emilie is busy trying to solve a mystery, (where is the child I’m supposed to caring for?), the audience is given a leg up on her by getting that question answered before her arrival (the child doesn’t exist). I think this is by design. Silverman isn’t interested in giving us a plot-driven mystery so much as exploring a mental state created by life on the moors. The characters exist without a proper outlet for their grand passions and the isolation is eating them up. We’re not building an argument; we’re following a mood. Therefore, time doesn’t function here the way it does in the real world (not that the characters can keep the days of the week straight anyway).
In fact, the content of the play may come from the Bronte’s, but Silverman’s methods are pure theater of the absurd. There are passages of dialogue (like one about the identity of the maid changing depending on what room she’s in), that would fit right in with early Ionesco. When the dog Mastiff first speaks, it’s with a monologue that could have come out of the mouth any of Beckett’s characters. Under Joe Juknievich’s careful direction, Entropy Theatre’s production seems to lean into this connection. The costume for Mastiff makes him look like he walked off a production of Waiting for Godot while parlor maid Marjory (Robin Abrahams) always seems to be clutching herself in a way that recalls May from Footfalls.
This is a stripped-down production, keeping its focus on the bare essentials of character. Director Juknievich knows that’s where the gems are. The one area of design where they’ve seemed to indulged are in Daisy Walker’s absolutely gorgeous costumes. They provide a flourish of color that keeps drawing our eyes to the actors. As Huldey, Kayleigh Kane has the wide-open eyes that suggest innocence and frailty. Then, every once in a while, a glimmer of something gloriously unhinged cracks through and you realize that the mask we’re looking at could shatter at any moment. When the character gives in to her wild emotions, Kane milks the moments for all of the humor she can. It’s a performance that works in sharp contrast to Kris Kim’s as the sister Agatha who manages to find a snarling smirk under the tightly wound Agatha. Debbie Aboaba gets to be one of the few characters radiating something like warmth and Aboaba is up to the challenge with a smile that draws you in. Then, always lurking around the edges of the stage is Robin Abrahams as the maid, Marjory. She doesn’t so much deliver her lines as growl them with a deadpan delivery and saunters away with many of the show’s laughs.
But for my money, the most affecting parts of the show come from what is essentially the B-plot, the (attempted) courtship of the Moor-hen by Mastiff. Lemay and Grant bring a lot of delightful charm to their scenes together, enough to make you happy to see them approaching the stage for another round. Eventually that relationship shifts gears and ends up turning into the punchline of a much darker joke, but there are pleasures to be had in watching them trace the arc.
What are we left with at the end of the play? I’m not totally sure. It may be that The Moors ends up being little more than a fun trifle for the book nerd in all of us, but I’m prepared to stand by it for that reason. Admittedly, there are aspects where production does start to show signs of strain, (the extended runtime of the show made me wish that it would either find a spot for an intermission or shave off fifteen minutes), but the fact remains that there’s a lot of wicked fun here worth diving into.
The Moors is presented by Entropy Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Black Box Theatre November 8-17, 2019.
For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.entropytheatre.com
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