The Effect Off-Broadway Reviews

Lloyd only emphasizes the play’s weaknesses with his sterile production that makes you feel like you’re observing lab rats from a distance. The actors’ voices are loudly amplified, making even their most intimate dialogue sound ring announcements at a boxing match. The sound and lighting effects, including portions of the stage floor lighting up strategically, are so emphatic that you expect a white-suited John Travolta to strut onto the stage and dance. You get the feeling that if the director had his way, he’d be wiring up audience members with sensors to gauge their reactions.

A regular laboratory for clinical trials is itself an artificial setting, as is the relationship between researcher and subject, so perhaps there’s an analogy at work here that explains the brutally artificial staging. The stage pictures can certainly be arresting. But it’s a conceptual imposition, which paradoxically keeps intellectual engagement secondary, at best. Director Jamie Lloyd’s last gig in New York, last year’s production of “A Doll’s House” on Broadway starring Jessica Chastain, was also devoid of props and of a realistic set, and also imposed a heavy-handed directorial conceit: The actors rarely stood up from their chairs. Lloyd clearly has a preferred aesthetic – call it minimalist chic – which others have praised as removing distractions so that the audience can focus on what matters. But what matters in a play? Is it only the theatrical effect?