THEATER - "The Amulet"

The Amulet, an incredibly difficult and too-poetic play by Peretz Hirshbein, starts simply enough by detailing the relationship between a girl, Mirel, and her blind grandfather, Menashe. This terse yet tender relationship, ambiguous and unexplained, is quickly washed away by the mystic, in fact, by a literal deluge. No sooner does Mirel forgo her heritage, a strange protective amulet, than the house is suddenly flooded and washed away. The two evacuate to a hill, the literally blind leading the metaphorically blind, and if you want to read into it, this exodus could be construed as a spiritual crossing.

For further abstract allegory, a stranger then washes up on the hill, and practically rapes Mirel in an effort to share enough body warmth to survive the freezing night. He then offers to lead her to a palace and riches if she will follow him to “the other side” of the river, but she refuses to leave her dead grandfather behind who, by this point (thanks to the inventive staging) is no more than a jacket sitting atop a raked platform. The final duet in this trilogy of short scenes finds Mirel recovering some days later, with a woman named Yachne, but you’ll just have to make what you will of all this: explanations are not on the menu.

If you accept that “you don’t always have to understand, it’s better to feel,” then the plot doesn’t matter. That assumes, of course, that there’s something to feel. Hanna Cheek does a suitable job as Mirel, but her frenzy and logic skews to the point where we, baffled, hear only screeching. The Stranger, played by Daryl Lathon, is a moment of sanity, but he’s also a one-dimension figment, and once he exits, we forget he ever existed. As for David Little, the production’s Menashe—he doesn’t seem to have his lines down, which makes one wonder if even he understands them, or if he’s just standing there proselytizing.

However, if we ignore the acting and the script and just focus on the mood, then director Isaac Butler manages to intrigue us for this eccentric hour. His choices are ambitious but, more importantly, lucid—the one thing in the show we who are being swept away by all the imagery can hold onto. For example, having an onstage percussionist creates an insistent throb of angry water, and the first impression of the stage—a dark, smoky room filled with candles—is the stereotype of mystery. As for the stage itself, by creating a small wooden platform in the center, and restricting all the action to it, Butler makes a prison of an already small space, and that tension, if nothing else, is palpable throughout.

I don’t think a play like The Amulet, isolated from emotion and engaged in illusion, can really hope to be anything more than an effect (to his credit, Butler has that fire stoked). However, because the acting never sweeps us away, body and soul, he must still deal with the inevitable questions of “What was he trying to say?” and “What did it all mean?”