UNFORTUNATELY FOR EVERY- ONE involved in PTP/NYC’s production of Thérèse Raquin—the director, the actors, the playwright, but especially myself—I had only recently read the Émile Zola novel from which Neal Bell adapted his play. And what is happening at the Atlantic Theater is markedly different from what Zola wrote.
Of course, any adaptation is liable to play fast and loose with the original work, and missing characters or plot points are only to be expected. But what Bell and director Jim Petosa have done is something far more sinister—they have given Zola’s dark work an unwelcome, campy sense of humor. As if realizing that the book’s incarnation in 2001 as the musical Thou Shalt Not suffered from taking the fatal passion between a young married woman and her sickly husband’s dashing best friend too seriously, they went out of their way to add moments of heavy-handed irony and gallows humor. But that approach has done nothing more than turn Thérèse Raquin into a kind of noir parody.
In a way, Thérèse Raquin is the forerunner to works like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, in which bored housewives meet handsome strangers and plot to kill their husbands for a chance at escape. But Zola also ushered in a new realism in novels with his gritty depiction of 19th-century life just above the poverty level, featuring a heroine who is more dead than alive until she has her first orgasm—courtesy of her husband’s childhood friend.
The problems with this production begin early, with Lily Balsen’s overheated delivery of Bell’s obvious dialogue. Under Petosa’s direction, Balsen’s Thérèse isn’t the emotionally atrophied woman Zola envisioned; she’s a spitfire who will not go gently into her good night, delivering instead a series of dark jokes of the kind that Winona Ryder made as the death-obsessed Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice or screaming, “I’m a bear!” as her husband’s friend Laurent takes her.Without the feeling that Thérèse is likely to be smothered alive by her circumstances, the story loses some of its impact. Balsen’s Thérèse seems more likely to steal the day’s receipts from the shop she runs with her mother-in-law and skip town than she is to sit every day at a dusty counter and listen to her husband coughing.
And though Scott Janes looks dashing in (and out of) Laurent’s long coat, he’s hardly the thick-necked brute described by Thérèse. Janes is more the Ashley Wilkes type than Thérèse’s French Rhett Butler. Of course, contrasted with Willie Orbison as Thérèse’s weak husband Camille, he seems like a bull among men. Orbison offers up a feathery-voiced impression of Michael Jackson that may be timely but is so shockingly ill-conceived that it comes as a relief when Thérèse and Laurent plot to kill him. Alas, he’s back as a ghoulish corpse in the second act, sputtering water all over his murderers without mussing his elaborate makeup.
Along the way to the final, unmoving finale, we’re treated to a recurring joke about a grapefruit peel (mostly delivered by Helen-Jean Arthur as Camille’s mother, who alternates between a woolly headed Golden Girls guest star and an Elaine Stritch impersonator), the world’s dullest games of dominoes with the most boring people in all of Paris (Peter B. Schmitz, Michael Kessler, Stephanie Spencer and Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki, all of whom give performances of varying quality), simulated sex that becomes laughable when the actors start writhing and moaning and reaching orgasm without having bothered to lift a skirt or unbutton a fly and one jaw-dropping re-creation of an elderly woman suffering a stroke.
The play and the actors earn plenty of laughs from the audience thanks to its insistent irony, but did no one involved stop to think that Thérèse Raquin isn’t actually a black comedy? When illicit sex elicits chuckles, something is very, very wrong.
> Thérése Raquin
Through July 26, Atlantic Stage Two, 330 W. 16th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-279-4200; times vary, $20.
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