Review: Survival in the Shadow of the Plague: Mad Horse Theatre's Searing ONE FLEA SPARE

Mad Horse Theatre continues its provocative and haunting programming this season with a gripping, poetic, and troubling production of Naomi Wallace's award-winning 1996 drama, One Flea Spare. The play, set in London in 1665 at the height of the Black Death, explores the social, sexual, and psychological interaction of four people quarantined together in a pair of rooms while the plague rages around them. Their battle for survival pits the wealthy merchant and his wife against the sailor and a young servant girl who break into their house in search of shelter. Class warfare, devastating past memories, repressed sexuality, gender politics, and intricate personal power struggles make the time of confinement a descent into hell.

Playwright Naomi Wallace creates five fully nuanced characters who fascinate the audience, and her command of language is nothing short of masterful. At the same time that a vast range of emotion is explored, together with unbearably painful memories, and violent physical and psychological cruelty is recounted, the dialogue soars with lyrical imagery that is at once visceral and transcendent. The descriptions of the horse afire or the probing of the sailor's wound or the misery of Mrs. Snelgrave's loveless marriage are filled with an aching beauty, and the monologues created for Morse, the worldly wise waif who wanders into these lives, glisten with a luminous visionary quality..

Thanks to Wallace's writing and to the superb direction of Reba Short, the more than two-hour long drama is spellbinding, keeping the audience at the edge of its seats in wrapt quiet, as situations and characters begin to unravel. The play requires that the pace be deliberate, languid - even maddeningly slow - and yet sustain the tension and the expectation, and Short and her cast deliver brilliantly. The set and props by Meg Anderson make attractive use of the small black box theatre, using a shroud like drapery to suggest the rear wall of the house, with broken slats to conjure up the street-side façade. Several simple semi-period pieces of furniture and evocatively angled lighting by Corey Anderson add to the dark, confined, ominous feeling of the piece. Jake Cote's sound design contributes baroque music and subtle effects like the consistent scene change chirp of a canary (a sign of persistent life). Christine Louise Marshall creates some truly beautiful 17th century costumes with accurate silhouettes and a true sense of texture and color.

The five-person cast comprised of guest artists and regular company members is up to the challenge of the material. As William Snelgrave, Payne Ratner is sanctimonious, oily, insidious, entitled in his privilege, and ultimate humbled and maddened by the ordeal. Deborah Paley plays his unhappy wife Darcy with just the right blend of compliance, compassion, longing, and courage, and she delivers some of the most touching emotional moments in the drama. Nick Schroeder makes for a husky-voiced, tormented, dangerous Bunce, who vibrates with pent-up energy and emotion. Mark Rubin plays Kabe, the guard who speaks with abandon, wit, and wisdom like one of Shakespeare's fools - the dark comic relief in the piece. Young Gracie Brassard has, in many ways the most difficult role to fill as the waif Morse - visionary, other-worldly creature or tough wily survivor? The young actress possesses the presence and the attitudes to be believable, but her delivery of some of the best monologues in the play was often only semi-intelligble.

Once again One Flea Spare is not an easy or obvious choice, but Mad Horse presents the worthy play with such commitment and such passion, that the audience cannot help but listen, and in listening, discover some valuable truths.

Photographs, courtesy Mad Horse Theatre, Allison McCall, photographer

ONE FLEA SPARE runs at Mad Horse Theatre form January 18-Februatry 4, 2018, at 24 Mosher St., South Portland, ME 04106 207-747-4148

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