Out of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s monumental novel of “The Idiot,” the Lookingglass Theatre Company has extracted a stage piece that is a combination of soap opera, comic strip, piercing tragedy and Expressionist film.
Director David Catlin’s adaptation not surprisingly does not contain a fraction of the emotional depth of the great Russian novel, but it does manage a few genuinely striking moments drawn primarily from its scenic design and from its cast.
The spare, elegant setting, by Dan Ostling, is little more than a plain platform set on the small square stage of the Jane Addams Hull House theater. Behind it is a sliding screen that, when pushed aside, opens into a smaller playing area and, when closed, serves as a movie screen for the occasional film segments that designer John Musial has created to mirror the hallucinatory mental state of the novel’s hero, Prince Myshkin.
Myshkin, the innocent, epileptic and “amorously inexperienced” man who is the Christ-like focal point of the novel, is embodied in this production by David Schwimmer, who has taken advantage of a break in filming his network series “Friends” to return to ensemble acting with his Lookingglass colleagues.
With his sad eyes and soft voice, Schwimmer is a natural for the role of the simple, loving Myshkin. Bearded and dressed in white, he holds himself almost motionless throughout his performance, except when he falls into a frighteningly real epileptic seizure.
In myriad details, he also demonstrates that his work in TV comedy has honed his sense of timing to a fine, sharp edge.
His passive, pacific character is held in sharp contrast to Michael Shannon’s volatile portrayal of Rogozhin, the violent, moody man voraciously obsessed with Nastasya Filippovna, the sad, bitter woman of too much experience whom both men love.
Neither Heidi Stillman, as Nastasya, nor Louise Lamson, as the spoiled rich girl who is the other romantic interest, are convincing as women whom Myshkin, out of pity and love, finds irresistible.
But Troy West, a Lookingglass stalwart, is most compelling, both as a prim, social-climbing aristocrat and as a drunken, ranting old officer dying of consumption, and Lawrence E. DiStasi provides some of the play’s best wit as the slick, sycophantic Lebedev, fluttering about Myshkin in hopes of picking up a few rubles.
For much of “The Idiot’s” three hours, it plays like a terribly turgid melodrama, and the cast’s frequent forays into humor more often than not come off as coarse and broad efforts.
Every once in a while, however, Catlin achieves a stage image (including the final scene of Myshkin, reaching for the heavens in a blinding white light) that is truly striking.
Anyone who attempts to put “The Idiot” on stage is, of course, something of an idiot. It can’t be done.
But Catlin’s version–which condenses, skips and revises passages while generally staying faithful to the novel’s story– shows signs of imagination in the way he uses his playing space and in the way he places his actors in dramatic tableaus.
You have to sit through some gauche stretches in this staging, but the inventive economy of the design, including Mara Blumenfeld’s costuming, and the striking bits of acting show that there’s no lack of talent in this erratic work.
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“The Idiot”
When: Through June 7
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Where: Lookingglass Theatre at Jane Addams Hull House, 3212 N. Broadway
Phone: 773-477-8088