Beauty on the Vine: Through a Glass, Darkly

Upon entering the Harold Clurman Theater to see Beauty on the Vine, the first thing an audience member sees are mirrors. The stage is lined with them, right in front of the first row of seats, making it impossible for the audience to look at anything except themselves. Then, as the play begins, the houselights dim and the mirrors become two-way, revealing a woman at a microphone far upstage, with layers of mirrors between her and the audience.

The entire theme of the evening is presented in those first few seconds when the mirrors become three-dimensional, revealing what is behind the obvious. Like a shattered looking-glass, Zak Berkman's script presents scenes in disjointed, non-linear fragments, leaping from moment to moment in the story of a conservative radio shock jock's intentional and unwitting influences on her listeners and her family. After her murder, her grieving widower begins to discover just how deep those influences went, affecting numerous girls and changing their lives. As the mystery unfolds, the tragedy becomes more than just one person's untimely and violent death, but the corruption of innocence and hope.

It's heady stuff, and Berkman handles it well, letting his script ask some pointed questions about appearance and truth, desire and ambition, and the future of women and feminism. While the play's non-linear structure makes the play somewhat confusing, Berkman's script is never dull. His language flows between realistic dialogue and gentle prose with ease, and his characters are fascinating and complex: never entirely heroic or villainous, they do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons. There is, however, very little reason for the piece to be so disjointed and fragmented, and while it certainly adds an interesting twist to the play, it seems like—pardon the pun-- overkill. The story is emotional, powerful and thought-provoking enough without the added device, and a few well-timed flashbacks in an otherwise linear script might serve it better.

As the doomed shock jock Lauren and (at least) two variations on the theme, young Olivia Wilde (late of TV's The Black Donnellys) shows promise, but doesn't seem quite up to the challenge of portraying three different characters at the same time. While she does excellent vocal work to differentiate between her disparate roles, her body language remains the same throughout, somewhat lessening the impact. As Lauren's husband Sweet, Howard W. Overshown conveys his character's grief with plenty of backbone, never letting him seem like a victim as he expresses his pain. As Lauren's father, Victor Slezak is given little to do other than be gruff and angry, and Barbara Garrick similarly makes the best of a mostly one-note, though mysterious, role. Helen Coxe does some nice comic work as Sweet's best friend, though her entire storyline seems disconnected from the rest of the play, and her character seems like a sounding board for Sweet to talk to. Jessica Richardson, saddled with speaking mostly gibberish in her few lines, performs very well without words, letting her face convey plenty of conflicting emotion. 

David Schweizer's direction keeps the play moving at an energetic pace, and he knows when to slow it down and let Berkman's words flow instead of crackle. Narelle Sissons' set is nothing less than extraordinary, creating horizontal layers on the stage that can be adjusted with a simple light change. (Justin Townsend's lighting works in perfect tandem with the set, both setting moods and creating locations.) The use of two-way mirrors for the entire set is wonderfully apropos for a show about beauty and hidden truths, and turning those mirrors into cages creates a chilling metaphor. Quite literally, at least in this production on Ms. Sissons' set, the characters are trapped by what they see before them, and moving beyond appearances is a journey unto itself.

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