Bleeding hearts

Trinity Rep's piercing Cryptogram

by Bill Rodriguez

THE CRYPTOGRAM. By David Mamet. Directed by Oscar Eustis. Sets by Michael McGarty. Lighting by d.m. Wood. Costumes by William Lane. With Anne Scurria, Brien McEleney, Colin Nagle. At Trinity Repertory Company through January 16.

A stunning theatrical convergence is taking place in Trinity Repertory Company's intimate downstairs theater. David Mamet's The Cryptogram -- an Obie-winner but a problematical play to stage -- has found the cast and director of its brooding dreams. This short, piercing play may be a dart to the heart in most productions, but here its chilling observations about close relationships all but take form and bleed.

This is a short-story of a play, running just 70 minutes, with only three characters in three economical scenes, without intermission. Ten-year-old John (Colin Nagle, alternating with Bennett Schlesinger), who is about to go on a camping trip with his father, is antsy with apprehension the evening we meet him. His mother, Donny (Anne Scurria), and a friend of the family, Del (Brian McEleney), wait and talk and try to get the boy to go to sleep. For many nights now, John has been making excuses to avoid going to bed.

It's not until the end of the first and longest scene that the play pivots under the unseen weight of Robert, the father, who never shows up. The boy finds a letter Robert left, saying that he is leaving Donny. The focus of all three was around John, and now the center will not hold, with internal anarchy resulting. We learn that the boy has been terrified of falling asleep, for that's when he hears voices and they tell him that it wouldn't be so bad to die. Eventually Del confesses to betraying Donny, and his remorse rings hollow even to him. Eventually Donny is so overwhelmed by being done wrong by the men in her life that she rages against them all, even her son, whom she begs for comfort -- though, ironically, mothering might be the only thing that can save his life and hers.

I saw the 1996 production at Yale Rep, which was fine but very much went to my head rather than my heart. Ellen McLaughlin, an occasional Trinity actor, did good work but gave Donny a frosty remoteness that permitted no deep feelings for her son. Under Oskar Eustis's direction, Anne Scurria gives the performance of her career, at least of the last two decades I've witnessed. She doesn't as much play against the severe Donny of the text as complement the portrayal by softening the woman between the lines. Scurria makes Donny whole. We see flashes of patience, caring and motherliness, before we see the blind rage that hurls her into self-protective hostility. She assaults her son with the words "Each of us is alone!," which becomes an admission of defeat rather than a cruelty.

Having a long-term homosexual crush on Robert, Del is emotionally frail, self-loathing, and pretentiously erudite to John and yet obtuse. He says "It's a mystery" a lot. Following conversations, as well as life, confuses him, whether the boy is saying he packed his slippers or Donny is slowly figuring out that Del was not on a camping trip with Robert the previous weekend. In the emotional minefield of the last two scenes, McEleney traipses oh-so-carefully. In the last moments of the play, he juggles chagrin and assertiveness with Donny, plus fury at the boy and immediate regret, in a wonder of modulated chameleon changes.

Much depends upon John, who has the only brief monologue of the play. ("We don't know what's real. All we do is say things.") Mamet gives the boy straightforward lines, with little emotional gear-changing, but that takes nothing away from Colin Nagle's effectiveness. He even gave John some little unexpected filigrees of boldness and frustration on opening night.

It's notoriously difficult to make Mamet's trademark fragmented dialogue sound natural. It's full of interruptions and overlaps, designated with anal specificity as to which prior word a line should start on. In this, his finest directorial accomplishment at Trinity since Angels in America, Eustis not only gets the talk to flow with seeming spontaneity, he goes on to fine-tune the interactions as though the entire play depended on every single nuance. Timing, so important to a play so rich in subtext, focuses our attention so that we lose very little of the underlying dynamics among the three.

The opening "home movies" we see before the play begins seem forced and unconvincing, since the father, who obviously is taking the pictures, is not even in one of the several happy scenes of birthday party and Christmas presents being opened. But that sets up a devastating moment in the transition to the last scene of the play: the boy is surreally warding off those unseen flickering images, those lies, as though his life depends on it. Other additions are also spot on -- a knife not only accomplishes some heavy symbolic lifting for the playwright, but Eustis gets in a spooky and apt reversal of Spin the Bottle.

Lighting design by d.m. Wood skillfully provides the effect of close-ups at crucial moments. The living room set, made claustrophobic by an overhanging ceiling, balances tastefulness with other-worldly circa 1959 lampshades. Michael McGarty's set design becomes masterful for the last scene, when the back wall drops and, as sealed packing boxes replace the furniture, blackness becomes the background to despair.

The Cryptogram, potentially a grim Dance of Death, soars magnificently at Trinity Rep.

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Truth and consequences

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