Jonathan Raymond Popp
Lorenzo (Joshua Woolfolk, left) and Frank (Francisco C. Torres).
There’s nothing funny about depression. But there is something funny about asking the man hemming your pants why he is like an almond. It is gut-wrenching to long so much for the touch of another human that you open your heart to a hair stylist. And it’s hilarious watching your boyfriend and your psychiatrist come to blows while fighting over a vial of your tears.
What’s the through-line of a play that’s so jam-packed with excesses of conflicting emotions? How do you balance the shifts in tone from serious to silly and back? This is the conundrum for the Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theatre (KRASS) in its current production of Sarah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, running at the Bartell Theatre through Aug. 19. It’s a puzzle that director Emily Morrison Weeks ultimately does not solve.
An early work by one of the country’s most lyrical and original playwrights, Melancholy Play is full of Ruhl’s signature quirks: poetry and absurdity, non sequiturs and characters unexpectedly breaking out into song. But Weeks plays it serious, slow and quiet, turning the circus of events that surround the main character into a funeral procession that strains to hold together.
When we first meet Tilly (the expressive Shirley Nwangwa), she is seeing an eccentric therapist who boasts that he is in complete control of all his emotions (Joshua Woolfolk, sporting a delightfully ambiguous European accent). But after speaking with his profoundly sad client, who has recently gone off her meds, the counselor is entranced and enchanted. Tilly’s melancholy puts everyone she meets under a spell, from her tailor (an earnest Francisco Torres), to her hair stylist (an affable Tia Tanzer), to her hair stylist’s British lesbian lover (a no-nonsense Suzan Kurry). Soon all are swooning over her and her tragic state. But when her malaise suddenly lifts, Tilly plunges all her would-be lovers and caregivers into despair.
Melancholy Play was presented in 2015 as a chamber musical with a full score. This production reverts to an original version with a cellist onstage throughout, providing dreary and woeful accompaniment to the scenes. It darkens the mood, and it doesn’t support the cast’s attempts at singing, which seem muddled and under-rehearsed. In addition to the somber soundtrack, the play also fights with actual darkness, since Patricia Micetic’s lighting design often obscures the action onstage.
The unequivocal bright spot in this serious farce is the prolonged fist fight between Tilly’s therapist and her tailor/beau. Choreographed by Torres à la The Three Stooges, it injects a delight in ridiculousness that could have truly benefitted the rest of the play.
