Festen

If you like your theater truly and madly theatrical, have I got a show for you! If you like your theater Shakespearean or, better yet, brutally and bloodily Jacobean, I can suggest a production that will sate your appetite no matter how ravenous you are. It’s Festen, Rufus Norris’s firestorm treatment of the 1998 Dogme film Celebration, with a script by David Eldridge adapted from the screenplay and play by Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov, and Bo Hr. Hansen.

The irony and the brilliance of this production is that Norris has suavely up-ended the letter of the film in order to retain its macabre spirit. As those who admire it know, the film was made in strict keeping with Dogme’s no-frills policy; the approach, which has facetiously been called the company’s “vow of chastity,” involves the avoidance of such elements as newly built sets, artificial lighting, and post-production sound or music. Hand-held cameras only are used. Abstinence is the proud byword.

In transferring the property to the stage, Norris has decided that whereas movies are movies, theater is theater. He’s determined that the way to instill Festen with new within-the-proscenium life isn’t to present an anemic, on-stage replica of the bruising commercial release — but to go boldly to the opposite extreme. He and production designer Ian MacNeil, who shares equal billing with the director on the program’s title page, have removed all vestiges of realistic setting and reverted to a traditional black box. Onto it they glide a long refectory table, raise an occasionally rumpled bed and, every once in a while, drop a ceiling fixture. (The lighting that sheds tarnished gold on all that basic black is by Jean Kalman.) Refusing to rely on ambient sound alone, Norris and MacNeil have authorized Paul Arditti to provide an award-worthy soundscape spliced with intensifying monotones (original music by Orlando Gough), clattering pots and pans, and — most eerily — a laughing child splashing in a bathtub.

The maniacally laughing child is crucial to the plot and to its most shocking revelation, which is deliberately made early enough so that the remaining action centers on the characters’ muted, conflicting responses to the horrifying information they’ve been given. Patriarch Helge (Larry Bryggman) has reached his 60th birthday. Ostensibly to honor him, wife Else (Ali MacGraw — yes, Ali MacGraw!) and children Christian (Michael Hayden), Helene (Julianna Margulies), and Michael (Jeremy Sisto) gather in the family’s Danish manor house with a couple of significant others and guests. Christian has something serious on his mind, and it’s not simply reviving a liaison with house retainer Pia (Diane Davis). Michael is a bigoted loose cannon, alternately fighting with and romancing his wife, Mette (Carrie Preston), though he behaves lovingly toward his daughter (Ryan Simpkins at the performance I saw). Helene, with black boyfriend Gbatokai eventually in tow, is the sibling most openly upset at the recent suicide of Christian’s twin, Linda.

Helene is certain that Linda has left a clue somewhere in the house to her reasons for choosing death, but it’s Michael who spills the beans on the damning related family secret. It won’t be reported here, but it’s enough to shoot this nuclear unit to the uppermost ranks of dysfunctional theater families. It’s also enough to trigger clashing responses not only from those immediately concerned, but also from house guests Helmut (Christopher Evan Welch) and Poul (David Patrick Kelly), butler Lars (Stephen Kunken), and cook Kim (C. J. Wilson). Many of the confrontations are physical — and convincingly so, thanks to fight director Terry King.

No one should leave Festen thinking that the play’s similarity to Hamlet is accidental. Here’s a son coming home to avenge a death, though it’s not a stepfather he’s after but a father. The play is set in Denmark, and there’s definitely something rotten in the state of local affairs. Just to make sure no one misses the point, Helge has a speech containing the phrase “tragical-comical, comical-tragical” that echoes Polonius’s “pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral” outburst in the second act of the Shakespeare tragedy.

Festen is after big fish; that’s why director Norris and adapter Eldridge use broad strokes to get what they’re looking to land. The cast obliges, with familiar Manhattan faces like Bryggman, Hayden, Preston, Kunken, Kelly, and John Carter (as the out-of-it grandfather) working wonders. Margulies and Sisto, who spend more time in Hollywood than on the east coast, also prove to be sturdy stage performers; though MacGraw, striking in Joan Wadge’s stylish frocks, has a by-the-numbers manner. The proof of the thesping expertise on view here — and that includes 2005 NYU acting program graduate Davis, making her Great White Way bow — is that as the ensemble plays the script’s final, silent moments, the audience remains quiet enough to hear a catharsis drop.

Still, the evening’s hero is Norris, whose only previous work seen in New York was his grizzly interpretation of Sleeping Beauty. He’s a genuine find, and right up there with this year’s other amazing English import, John Doyle. Norris scored with Festen when he first put it on at London’s Almeida Theatre with an English cast. Now, having so marvelously guided the stateside players, he has neatly repeated his slam-bang success.