Review: Mournful FALLING OUT OF TIME at Theater J

Siri, the electronic personal assistant installed on every iPhone, can be helpful in very many areas, but has heretofore has yet to be recognized for theater criticism.

Not far into the opening night performance of "Falling Out of Time," the adaptation of David Grossman's book of grief and loss at Theater J, however, she could be heard to comment quite clearly, "Sorry, I didn't get that."

This may be yet another reason theaters urge patrons to silence or switch off their devices before curtain. But there wasn't so much a curtain in the production at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center theater. Actors were already on stage or, in a couple of cases, in the seats, doing their things (mindless, wordless activities mostly) as the audience took its seats.

Two whole rows of the theater were boarded off to allow actors to conduct their ever widening circles of pacing. More striking, a dozen or so viewers were ushered to seats on stage to watch the play (so you might want to give extra thought to what you're wearing when you go).

A flier distributed at the door tipped off some of these things and also offered this unusual fact: "The soup used in this performance is kosher & vegan." (Which only makes one wonder throughout: When is the soup coming?)

Those familiar with David Grossman's book know it as an elegy by parents for children who have died. Grossman wrote it after losing his own son in a 2006 war in Lebanon, but also was condemned for speaking out for reaching out to Palestinians for peace and condemning the spread of Israeli settlements.

But in a production supported in part by the Embassy of Israeli and Israeli's Office of Cultural Affairs, on the day that four of the five major presidential candidates were in town to speak to the big conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group known as AIPAC, "Falling Out of Time" could scarcely be less political.

Not only was it not set in a specific place or time, its characters had generic names like Man, Midwife and Chronicler.

This might have been intended to provide the figures an archetypal universality but tended to place them further from reality. Already they didn't seem to talk to one another or interact in a recognizable human way, but to state their truths and talk in riddles.

Derek Goldman's adaptation of the novel translated by Jessica Cohen, which he also directed, upholds many of the original author's tendency to speak in verse in presenting a kind of haunted folk tale about grief that permeates the ages. But it falls short of any ambition to be a kind of staged metaphor out of Beckett.

To be sure, many of the lines ring deep.

How can a father move into September when he left his son in August? "The boy is dead," goes another line. "I understand, almost, the meaning of the sounds." For those who have similarly suffered loss, particularly that of a child, these thoughts of a village may bring support.

For others I imagine it will be an ordeal to hear its cast's mournful declarations for more than an hour as it tromps sadly through the dedicated rows in a kind of searching ritual, over and over.

For all of its plaintive observations about grief and mourning, there are moments that undercut it, as when characters incessantly talk of going "there" to find their lost children, only to find no there in no there there, as if they've approach the realm of Gertrude Stein's Oakland, if not the wordplay of Abbott & Costello. (And that may be part of the challenge of translating one culture to an American one).

The advantages of reading a mournful tale over seeing it performed comes clear when the bereaved cast begins doffing its clothes to join their dead offspring in death. The graves and dirt are imaginary, and the shedding of clothes near that - costume designer Ivania Stack has made them all flesh-colored underthings lined with veins of blood red.

The cast of Joseph Wycoff, Erika Rose, Michael Russotto, Rafael Untalan, Nora Achrati, John Lescaut, Nanna Ingvarsson, Leo Ericsson and Edward Christian do what they can with what they have - declarations more than dialogue.

And though the area's top clowns Mark and Emma Jaster are hired on as "movement co-directors," there couldn't be less mirth in the piece, except when the writing "centaur" is described as "half man, half desk" (or when Siri piped up).

And soup? I only saw a couple of audience members get a hot cup at play's end.

"Falling Out of Time" is a world premiere for Theater J, which also means in many ways a first draft of whatever it will become. But having first served as a page-to-stage reading by Theater J at the Kennedy Center last fall, with much the same cast, perhaps that is the way to present a work so dependent on words.

For one of the post-show discussions, Theater J is partnering with The Parent Circle - Families Forum, a joint Palestinian Israeli organization of over 600 families who has lost a family member as a result for the conflict.

But that the conflict itself never comes up in the production shows how different already Theater J is under new artistic director Adam Immerwahr (though it was interim artistic director Shirley Serotsky who selected the play) than it was under Ari Roth, whose new Mosaic Theater has already tackled loss and grief from the same conflict this season from "Wrestling Jerusalem" to "I Shall Not Hate" with powerful specificity.

Running Time: 85 minutes, no intermission.

Photo credit: Nora Achrati and Rafael Untalan in "Falling Out of Time." Photo by C. Stanley Photography.

"Falling Out of Time" continues through April 17 at Theater J of the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St NW, Washington D.C. 202-777-3210 or online.

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