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player ready...Something’s rotten in the duchy of Malfi. Lust, revenge, double-crosses — even the holy books are poisonous. But in Christopher Marino’s high-octane staging of “The Duchess of Malfi” for Trap Door Theatre, all the delicious gothic excess can’t camouflage the moral queasiness at the heart of playwright John Webster’s Jacobean classic.
It’s rare for Trap Door, purveyors of the best of contemporary European playwrights, to reach this far back along the dramaturgical timeline. But it’s also good to see some of the Trap Door regulars tear into Webster’s purple language and red-in-tooth-and-claw gallery of unnatural acts with skill and verve. Marino, former artistic director for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, creates a balance between the cold calibration and the histrionic effluvia permeating this world.
It’s easy enough to see the bones of misogyny and class resentment holding up the corpus, but Marino resists the temptation to shoehorn contemporary sociopolitical viewpoints into the mix. This Malfi is everywhere and nowhere — a nightmare alternate reality that exists when self-interest and short-term gain (whether fiscal or physical) destroys our better angels.
It’s also surprisingly funny — that is, if an obscene dumb show performed by “madmen” is your idea of funny. (Trust me, it works — even if it’s also disturbing as hell.)
As the title character — a widow who, against the dictates of her brothers, secretly weds and has a family with a commoner — Lyndsay Rose Kane moves from a rather pettish and immature woman to one whose descent into the maelstrom of political intrigue and murder deepens her self-knowledge. It’s a mesmerizing turn, and Kane is balanced by her onstage brothers. John Kahara’s Cardinal, a man of the cloth who regularly enjoys the pleasures of the flesh in his own clinical way, provides the cold-steel resolve, while Casey Chapman’s Ferdinand is a classic hysteric in love with his twin sister.
The most important fulcrum here is Kevin Cox as Bosoloa, the servant placed in the duchess’ home (tellingly, she has no name aside from her title) to spy on her, and to eventually betray her. It’s a layered and complicated part despite the bloodshed, and Cox plays it without pandering for our pity or begging for understanding. Bosoloa goes through a moral transformation, but too late for it to be of any real use. It’s as if Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men” decided to seek penance, only to find that there is no one left to hear his confession.
REVIEW: “The Duchess of Malfi”
3 STARS
Through Feb. 20, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland Ave. $20-$25 at 773-384-0494 or trapdoortheatre.com