The opening, pre-show minutes of A Devil Inside set a mood: Anonymous skyscrapers are silhouetted against a chartreuse sky. Actors playing the plain and the pathetic do stage business in a seedy laundromat. The jangling and discordant sounds of Miles Davis’ “Pharaoh’s Dance” fill the air. It’s atmospheric! It’s urban! It’s a city on the brink, ripe for absurdity, fatalism and bitterly ironic plot twists! Directed by Julia Diamond (CAS ‘02), David Lindsay-Abaire’s work springs to chaotic and frenzied life in Nomadic Theatre’s final production of the year.
As it happens, the six lunatics who roam the city and comprise the cast of A Devil Inside are inhabiting an eye-of-the-hurricane, calm-before-the-storm period that will inexorably gather momentum and, avalanche-like, come crashing down around their heads like so many tons of bricks, as Manhattan slides into the Hudson River. That may be mixing of metaphors, but very little else could come close to approximating the appallingly complicated weaving of plotlines and destinies that comprises the two acts of Devil. Clearly a reader of the great Russian novelists and the classic Greek tragedies, Lindsay-Abaire has plucked elements of both to create his New York, where dogs bay in the streets (Antigone), men are obsessed with murder (Crime and Punishment), and the hand of Fate slowly closes around the protaganists (all literature from both traditions, really).
The chainlink of the play’s narrative begins with Mrs. Slater, a laundromat owner and mother who was widowed 14 years ago when her husband, a “wonderful fat man,” was murdered walking cross-country to lose weight. Mrs. Slater’s son, Gene, is turning 21, and in a scene emblematic of the grandiosity and black humor of the play, Mrs. Slater stands proudly in her laundromat, places her hands on his shoulders and proclaims, “I want you to avenge your father’s death!”
Gene, in turn, has a crush on his Russian Lit classmate Caitlin, a black-clad Anna Karenina wannabe much given to making statements such as “I want to live a horrible, passionate life!” Caitlin is searching for a person with as much baggage as she thinks she has, a quest that has ended with her and Gene’s professor, a twitchy, tortured Dostoyevsky scholar named Carl Raymonds. Raymond is himself obsessed with a Raskolnikov-like desire to murder the plain man named Brad who runs the neighborhood fix-it shop. Brad is harboring a foot-sketching, insence-burning nouveau boho named Lily. Of course, this being a play with the aforementioned Greek and Russian inspirations, these connections only scratch the surface of the intricate lattice of relationships that unfold over the course of the play.
Mrs. Slater and the beleagured Gene begin the play, and their opening scene together embodies all that is best about A Devil Inside. Meredith Grasso (CAS ‘02) plays Mrs. Slater as a slightly deranged but good-hearted woman hounded by ridiculous tragedy. Natural and displaying bullseye comic timing, Grasso makes all of her scenes a delight to the eye and ear. As Gene, Sean McKelvey (CAS ‘04) is slight and rumpled, likeable and earnest. Spending most of the play reacting to the more flamboyant characters around him, McKelvey seems a little lost when the spotlight is on him and him alone. However, as the closest thing to normal Devil presents, McKelvey’s Gene is easy to relate to and sympathize with.
Raymonds, as portrayed by James Salandro (CAS ‘03), is harder to relate to, probably because he is a complete crazy. Speaking in dramatic swoops and accenting with even more dramatic pauses, stalking around the stage, and blinking, jerking and eyebrow-raising like a speed freak on a bender, Salandro is a tornado of mannerisms. Surprisingly, what should be an exhausting, not to say irritating, performance is actually funny and perfectly appropriate to his bizzaro character.
Similarly, Lily, interpreted by Elizabeth Fountain (CAS ‘02) and her hair extentions, is spacy, suspicious and fidgity. While sometimes showy, Fountain makes a believably damaged and oddly appealing weirdo.
If Fountain is showy, Jon Shoup-Mendizabal (SFS ‘04) who plays the closet-nutjob-next-door Brad, is positively baroque in his excess. That the script calls for him to have a co-dependant relationship with a wallpaper devil is a fact, but Shoup-Mendizabal’s hysteria seems misplaced. He sure does have some nifty wrestling moves, though. Natalie Howe (SFS ‘02) as Caitlin is similarly enthusiastic, but she oversells the physicality of her character.
The set, by Michael Boyle (SFS ‘02), captures the eerie, alienated vibe for which the script calls for: Chaos is a foregone conclusion in the bleak, ugly world he has created. Sound design, too, by Max Coffman (SFS ‘05), supports and uplifts the production. The play itself is a spottier affair. As directed by Diamond, the first act hums along, but doesn’t build up enough momentum to carry it through the innumerable twists and turns of the second act. As such, the production seems to sputter and stall out somewhere around the middle of said act, when the shrieking and running blur together in a sensory overload of hysteria. Maybe it’s the cumulative weight of a thousand fatal coincidences; maybe it’s the oppresive chartreuse sky. In any case, despite some great performances and a nice visual vibe, A Devil Inside makes it hard to care about the stories and characters it is at such pains to set up.
A Devil Inside will be playing in the Walsh Black Box Theater April 4 and 5 at 8 p.m., April 6 at 7 p.m. and April 11-13 at 8 p.m. General admission tickets are $7
