WILD HONEY Bailiwick Repertory
But I dunno. He seemed like a jerk to me. Puerile and adolescent. With this shit-eating little grin he’d put on and dance around in, as a substitute for charm. His conversation was less witty than sarcastic–even bullying, at times, as when he made a point of fawning over a very timid woman for whom his attentions were clearly a form of torture. Or when he seemed expressly to insult his wife by flirting with Anna Petrovna in her presence. I couldn’t understand what everybody found so terribly compelling about this ass.
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At least, that’s what I think happens. I can’t be sure because this Bailiwick Repertory production offers some disconcertingly ambiguous signals. What I’m choosing to take here as a matter of design may in fact be a failure of same. What I’m interpreting as a novel view of Platonov may actually be an inability to make something more conventional of him. Wild Honey is British playwright Michael Frayn’s rewrite of a very early, very long, and comparatively awkward script by Anton Chekhov, a rough draft of which was exhumed from a safe-deposit box in Moscow 16 years after Chekhov’s death. Both Chekhov’s text and Frayn’s revision concede Platonov some genuine charisma. He’s not a complete straw man, and it’s possible to see his story as a sort of tragedy of underachievement.
