RING ROUND THE MOON
Part of Ring Round the Moon’s artificiality is deliberate; indeed, this is a story about artifice, in which the playwright’s theatrical tricks both propel and comment on the antics of the characters. Hugo and Frederic, scions of a wealthy old French family, are identical twins, but their physical similarity belies their disparate personalities. Frederic is a gentle, emotional naif given to melancholy; Hugo is a cold, cynical ladies’ man with a penchant for cruel game playing. Frederic loves and is engaged to Diana, an egotistical heiress–the daughter of a Polish businessman–who doesn’t love him. Knowing that adventuress Diana will only make his brother unhappy, Hugo sets out to break up the pair. Hugo invites Isabelle, a dancer in the Paris Opera ballet, to a fancy ball and instructs her to pose as a mysterious heiress and to stir Frederic’s interest and Diana’s jealousy. The little ruse leads to a series of increasingly inconsequential plot complications, until the proper boy-girl couplings arbitrarily fall into place just in time for the third-act curtain.
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And she’s not much helped by Kevin Rigdon’s workmanlike set–with real goldfish (!) in the onstage wishing pool–or Erin Quigley’s costumes, both better suited to a teenager’s fairy-tale theme party in Lake Forest than a fancy French ball the bygone era that Ring Round the Moon represents. In most every area, Steppenwolf’s commonness of touch loses hold of what virtues Anouilh’s strange, slight script might still offer.
