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Written by Jody Hirsh
Feb 10, 2011
“Speaking in Tongues” is a perfect production for our times – a challenging and engrossing examination of love, trust, betrayal and need in a turbulent and fragile world. Rep artistic director Mark Clements, who directed both the London and New York premieres of the play, wisely made it part of his first season in Milwaukee.
The brilliance of this play is the way its mystery unfolds. Rather than a systematic chronology of events, the script is a seemingly haphazard intersection of circumstances. Playwright Andrew Bovell, who first produced the play in 1998, conceived of it as a web of human relationships. Four actors play nine characters (another character is talked about but never seen).
Bovell adapted his work into a 2001 Australian film titled “Lantana,” starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey. The cinematic version is necessarily more chronological, with each character played by a separate actor. In the Rep’s production, Lee Ernst, Jenny McKnight, Jonathan Smoots and Deborah Staples bring clarity and individuality to each of their nine characters.
From the very first scene, we are thrust into the complex worlds of four characters on the verge of extramarital affairs. Two scenes are performed simultaneously, in two separate and squalid hotel rooms. In a theater world that increasingly tends to emulate cinema, where the central rule is “show them, don’t tell them,” the glorious language of this scene (like all the play’s dialogue) sets it apart from most other contemporary plays. Poetic, yet accessible, the language is astonishingly powerful.
The opening scene is orchestrated perfectly into a symphony of dialogue, with characters sometimes speaking the same words, or dovetailing their lines between the two different scenes. Director Laura Gordon masterfully navigates the spoken word with the hand of a musical conductor. In repeating each other’s lines, the actors create not just a powerful glimpse of four random people driven to infidelity, but the images of four troubled human beings of “everyman” stature.
Much of the play consists of long speeches describing incidents or dreams, which become interwoven in surprising ways. Most striking is the need of the characters to tell their stories to perfect strangers. This complex matrix of conversation and intimacy becomes the “speaking in tongues” alluded to in the title of the play.
The screen version added a gay nuance to the story – a gay character and the suspicion that one of the “straight” husbands is having a gay affair on the side. But even without this plot in the stage version, it becomes a powerful and universal illumination of human isolation and need, especially in The Rep’s capable hands.
“Speaking in Tongues” runs through March 13 in the Stiemke Studio of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Call 414-224-9490 or go to www.milwaukeerep.com.
