Review: ONE FLEA SPARE at Brown / Trinity Rep (MFA)

John Donne is a divisive guy. Few question the 17th century poet’s brilliance, but readers have long debated whether his mind-bending conceits are worth the effort of deciphering them. Case in point: “The Flea,” a convoluted love lyric in which Donne compares a flea — engorged with bodily fluids from him and his would-be lover — to the “marriage bed” in an attempt to get her to sleep with him. It’s an ingenious conceit, but not a particularly appealing one; the poem’s heart is obscured by this intellectual gambit.

A line from “The Flea” serves as the titular reference of Naomi Wallace’s ONE FLEA SPARE, a play that considers the commingling of terror, desire, and blood that sever and bind people in times of plague. Brown / Trinity Rep’s current MFA program production of the play leans into the script’s stylized characters and heady symbolism, leaving audiences with an experience that — a bit like the Donne poem it quotes — compromises emotional resonance for intellectual prowess.

It’s 1665 in London, and bubonic plague is ravaging the city. William and Darcy Snelgrave (played by David Bertoldi and Allison Jones), a wealthy elderly couple, long to follow the rest of London’s upper ranks to the countryside, where they can avoid the flea-bearing rats that are spreading the epidemic. Instead, they have been forced to quarantine in their city home after their servants all died of the disease. Their 28-day isolation is about to end when two desperate strangers — a deserting sailor named Bunce (J. Austyn Williamson) and a mysterious young girl named Morse (Tay Bass) — sneak into their house for shelter. 

Thus, the quarantine clock is reset — this time with four strangers of different classes sharing close quarters, deep traumas, and simmering resentments.  

For audiences with fresh memories of the Covid pandemic’s heights, the claustrophobic scenario — and the dire social inequalities it foregrounds — may seem all too familiar. Rather than amplifying these resonances with trappings that evoke the 21st century, director Sharifa Yasmin intensifies the play’s Brechtian qualities, with hyper-stylized set and staging that take the action into a realm beyond the ahistorical, and into the symbolic. These choices create emotional distance that threatens to disengage the audience, but they also provoke thought and announce Yasmin as a risk-taking young director.

The production’s most successful experiment is its set. A 2-story “house” built only of wooden foundation beams, it dominates the center of the theater space, with two narrow lengths of seating running lengthwise at either side. Sara Pisheh’s design creates a sense of the players’ confinement: it is a world reduced to a house, and a house reduced to a wooden-barred prison. This claustrophobic feeling is heightened by Kathy Ruvuna’s sound design, which uses a persistent industrial ambient soundtrack to weave a tense sonic backdrop.

Other choices feel more clever than effective. For much of the play, characters “interact” in pantomime, from different chambers of the house; this highlights the isolation of quarantine (and the distance between their class stations), but it dilutes the potency of these scenes, which would otherwise crackle with the dangerousness of proximity during plague. When the Snelgraves move in right angles — like pieces on a chess board — it evokes the constructedness of their privilege, and the strategic games the lower classes must play to navigate around it. But it also erects another layer of artifice in a play that’s already heavy with the script’s abstract lyricism and stylized characters. 

The cast (rounded out by Katsuto Sakogashira as Kabe) fully commits to these choices, but they are not served well by them. With the exception of Darcy — who Jones vivifies with trauma, fear, and desire — their characters, which the script already shapes more into symbols than people, become even more abstract, their plights less effecting. 

Brown / Trinity Rep’s ONE FLEA SPARE doesn’t bore, and sometimes sparkles. But its power is diluted by directorial decisions that, though smart on paper, deepen the distance between performance and audience. The production offers a cerebral look at a visceral phenomenon — one where intellectual risks provoke thought, but compromise emotional resonance. 

Brown / Trinity Rep’s ONE FLEA SPARE runs through November 12 at the Pell Chafee Performance Center, located at 87 Empire Street, Providence, RI. Tickets are $7 for students, $10 for seniors, and $15 for adults. They are available online at www.trinityrep.com and via phone at 401-351-4242.

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