A PHOENIX TOO FREQUENT
If the story was timeworn when Fry wrote it in 1946, the passage of almost 40 years has done nothing to make it fresher. Boy meets girl, boy almost loses girl, boy gets girl. In a time when “meeting cute” was almost a requirement of love stories on stage and screen, the initial encounter between the lovers-to-be was a little offbeat–but only because Fry had lifted his plot from Petronius, that ancient master of black comedy and the author of the Satyricon.
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Tegeus, a handsome young officer in the Roman army, leaves his post–where he is guarding the dead bodies of criminals to prevent their families from burying them–to investigate the voices he hears coming from a nearby mausoleum. The voices are those of two women–the lady Dynamene and her servant Doto, who have entombed themselves with the corpse of Dynamene’s husband Virilius, an imperial bureaucrat. The women are starving themselves to death so they may accompany Virilius across the River Styx to the land of the dead.
Cartmill, whose own drama Incorruptible, at Bailiwick Repertory, relied heavily on live music and theatrically stylized design, employs those same elements here to good, if limited, effect. Violinist Jan Gieger and soprano Sarah Worthington set the mood with a preshow concert of music by Wolf and Faure; the potential impact is diluted by the violinist’s intonation problems and the singer’s alarmingly broad vocal wobble, but their presence strikes a darkly comic resonance. Set designer Gregory Musick and lighting designer Cliff Vick have transformed Cafe Voltaire’s low-ceilinged, stone-walled basement space (a former video lounge) into a tomblike setting that, while not particularly convincing, encourages the audience’s receptiveness to the playfully artificial quality that makes Fry’s play probably more intriguing now than it was when it was new.
