THEATER - "In Delirium"

So imagine a Hamlet character comes onto the stage—in this case, a sparse, gray-walled asylum with a metaphorical chandelier collapsed in one corner and a chair leaning against another—to give the suicidal "To be or not to be" speech. This is already either immensely exciting or incredibly dull.

If we assume you are one of the former, then at first you think, "Oho, is this not fine? Here is a splendid actor, with such enunciation, taking us on a metaphysical journey of pain, loss, and sorrow." The actor concludes the speech, but something snaps in him, and rather than leaving the stage, he continues to rail against his misfortune at being out of love (so he is now Romeo, as well) and the monologue continues. Now you think, "Well, it's impressive, how he goes on." Ten minutes later, you think, "My, how he goes on." Twenty minutes later: "Is he still on?" This is the curious circumstance of "In Delirium: after the sorrows of young werther," a play based on—you guessed it—Goethe's seminal book on a young man's love-borne suicide, "The Sorrows of Young Werther." Whereas the book was revolutionary in 1774, it's more than passé today, although the so called "Werther effect" may come back into vogue if audience members, bored out of their minds, contemplate a little suicide themselves to pass the time. In that, at least, "In Delirium" has succeeded.

It has also succeeded, surprisingly, in all the technical aspects of a production. Lucrecia Briceno has done a startling job of using dramatic lighting to emphasis Werther's growing madness and discontent. These are cinematic moments: Joshua Randall (Werther) impaled upon the asylum wall by a beam of light, or imprisoned in the center of the stage by a sinister halo. Likewise, John Ivy's sound design throbs in pitch with Randall's temperament, the difference being that while Randall is somewhat limited in his vocal palette, Ivy is able to traverse the whole set of ambient sounds, which only heightens the unsettling mood. If this proves anything, it's that simple is best, which is probably why Gisela Cardenas' direction, which has Randall constantly in motion and always fiddling with something, is so wearisome. Why not just let the lunatic speak his piece in peace, as he goes to pieces?

All this would be excused—or at least not so noticeable—if Randall were up to the task of playing Werther. While the length and difficulty of the script makes his memorization of it impressive, I can't say that he's mastered it, which is more than half the battle. What good are reversals if you stay in the middle, never fully hitting the romantic highs, and certainly failing to reach the dramatic lows? The ambience is there, but Randall's tenor voice seems frightened of the frenzy that the text demands. Playing madness safely, from a distance, makes it cool, clinical, and boring.

Nor is the script safe from blame, though that should come as no surprise since I've already blamed its adaptors, Cardenas and Randall, of missing the point. This is a long winding treatise, and it's dense, oh so very dense. Such a presentation needs to be far livelier, and just a bit more playful (like say, "Thom Pain"), if it's to keep us intrigued; the sad truth is that nobody cares what Randall-as-Werther is going to do next. It's all pretty much the same, which makes "In Delirium" nothing more than a sad display of technical prowess.