Liz Lauren
Kayla Carter (with book) and Tracy Michelle Arnold on the set of "The Moors."
Kayla Carter (left) and Tracy Michelle Arnold in "The Moors," American Players Theatre, 2022.
Fans of the Brontë sisters and desolate English country manors will feel a familiar chill when the lights come up on American Players Theatre’s current production of The Moors. The slightly absurd, comically dark, sort-of period piece by Jen Silverman is a disorienting mix of gothic tropes turned sideways, the patriarchy turned upside-down, talking animals turned to romance, and a chiming clock that marks time in the 1840s, the present, and no time at all. Directed with icy precision by Keira Fromm, this startling play runs in the Touchstone Theatre through October 9.
As the lights come up, a brisk wind buffets an imposing grand house in the north of England occupied by largely monochromatic women — two spinster sisters and an ashen-faced maid clad in beautifully detailed gowns of black and gray. (The stunning costume design is by Mieka van der Ploeg.) In the sparsely furnished room that has been absorbed by the surrounding moors, there is a sense of both bleak monotony and heavy foreboding.
As the peculiar ladies of the house, Agatha and Huldey (Tracy Michelle Arnold and Kelsey Brennan) prepare for the arrival of a governess from London, there is a lingering feeling that something sinister is waiting just around the corner. Is there something menacing hiding in the savage moors? In the strangely quiet nursery? In the uncannily identical bedroom/sitting room/parlor/portrait gallery/dining room? Or perhaps in the attic?
This feeling does not abate when the carriage arrives, with the perfectly pink-clad, apple-cheeked tutor Emilie inside (Kayla Carter), who enters carrying her pink-cased lute. She brings music, vitality, curiosity and love to a place where nothing is as it seems. As the audience’s proxy, Emilie has so many questions. Like, why does the parlor maid (the deliciously subversive Aurora Real de Asua) look and sound just like the scullery maid? Where is the man of the house, Branwell, who has written Emilie so many romantic letters, imploring her to come? And underneath her gruff manner, why does Agatha have that self-satisfied half-smile on her face?
The answers unfold slowly, creating a sort of alternate universe Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights that is both more macabre and more liberated than the originals. Arnold’s character, Agatha, is particularly interesting in this version; smart, goal-oriented, ambitious and passionate, she keeps her outward emotions carefully in check but will not be passive in achieving her ultimate “contentment” — all she has to do is subvert the patriarchy by defying, imprisoning, impersonating, or rendering the men in her life superfluous.
Scenes between Agatha and her employee-with-benefits Emilie are simultaneously touching, provocative and grounded in a gritty reality of a woman’s place in the 19th century. Kindred spirits, the women realize they have much more in common than they thought at first glance. They are both tired of being restricted by men and their stations and they are both self-interested above all. Watching both actresses expand their initial, stereotypical characters into refreshingly atypical women so they can plausibly meet at an unusual common ground is fascinating.
In contrast to Agatha, Huldey is insecure, starved for attention, and not that bright. Brennan is pleasantly simple, presenting the younger sister as child-like in both her desires and her capabilities — needing help to to fix her hair; thrilled with a new dress; delighting in a potential playmate, Emilie, coming to stay; and journaling her thoughts and tantrums with a vague hope that they will someday make her famous. As Brennan reads her daily log to the audience, she does so with a practiced flourish of her arm, as if Huldey is imitating something she saw in a melodrama. Her desperation for interaction and inability to understand the consequences of her actions make her very suggestable, which is good news for the maid but not for other members of the household. Brennan’s incredible performance of a “ballad” proclaiming Huldey’s most noteworthy accomplishment is both a shock to the audience and a comment on shallow grasps at fame. Borrowing from the musical Six, it is a bizarre and fantastic climax for the character.
And then there's the dog.
In a wildly unconventional sub-plot, the mansion’s pet dog simply named “the mastiff” has a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair with a moor hen. Constantly chastised by Agatha and perhaps missing his former master, this is one existentially depressed canine, embodied with droopy, sad-eyed perfection by APT favorite Jim DeVita. (Yes, you’ve seen him as Romeo, Hamlet and Macbeth; now see him as a tortured soul trapped in the unkempt fur of the family pet.) Silverman’s poetic side shines here in gorgeous blank verse, bestowing the mastiff with all the brooding mystery of a Byronic hero. Arrogant, intelligent, self-destructive, moody and somehow charismatic, he is a stand-in for the Brontë characters Heathcliff and Rochester. He is also irresistible.
DeVita accomplishes a preposterous acting challenge with ease — physically embodying the mannerisms of a doleful, dutiful, love-starved dog while completely enchanting both the audience, and a small-brained but instinctually perceptive moor hen (a divine Colleen Madden). As his love and his demands on that love increase, the slippery slope from desire to domination is clearly marked ahead, but we plunge forward anyway: I mean, just look at those eyes.
Ultimately Silverman uses the mastiff to expose the folly of falling for such a destructive, selfish man. She asks the audience to reassess its sympathy and affection for cruel, egotistical “bad boys,” which can be seen so much more clearly when they are embodied by an animal — one that was never going to be successful at loving a bird that it would rather eat.
As the bird-brained bird, Madden is also mesmerizing. Dressed in a Halloween, steampunk version of feathers, she is wary of the natural predator, but also amused by him. And when she injures her leg in yet another crash landing, she is very grateful for the care that he shows her. And then there’s the poetry. How can a girl bird resist the incredible declarations of love that the mastiff proclaims, with such artistry that the audience also swoons? He opines:
I have the strangest sensation.
It’s this feeling in my heart-cavern
as if spring has come
and all the birds are falling upwards.
Madden’s happy cooing is a delightful acknowledgment of her fluttering heart. But for all her short-term memory problems and limited vocabulary, this hen knows instinctively how this doomed romance will end, much more clearly than we do.
As in a gothic romance, here one knows upon entering this haunted house that there will be horrors. There will be, as Huldey says, “a splash of color,” much more dramatic than the pink frocks Emilie wears when she enters the dreary mansion. The world turns violently upside-down. Compared to APT’s normal costume dramas, it’s shocking. But as an addition to the company’s “classic” stories, The Moors is thrilling.
