Margarita Levieva and Adam Rothenberg in 'The Retributionists' / Photo by Joan Marcus
One of the worst things about the abysmal Impressionism last season was Margarita Levieva’s wooden, unappealing performance. Now, like some whack-a-mole slasher film villain, she’s baaaack in Daniel Goldfarb’s intermittently entertaining The Retributionists.
Guess what? She’s still wooden and unappealing, giving a painfully obvious performance as the manipulative Anika, who is part of a Jewish plot to poison Germans shortly after the end of World War II. Goldfarb’s script, set in 1940s France and Germany is structured and written like a political noir. It even features a flashback. Anika, her fiancé Dov (Adam Driver), and their former shared lover Dinchka (Cristin Milioti) have put into action a plan to poison the water supply as punishment for Nazi atrocities. But when Dov is arrested while en route with Dinchka, Anika enlists her former lover Jascha (Adam Rothenberg) to infiltrate a Nuremberg bakery and poison the bread.
Spinning his play around a true story, Goldfarb is less interested in maintaining suspense regarding the radical plot’s outcome than in recreating the noir world of double-crossings and femme fatales. Anika has no qualms about seducing Jascha one last time to convince him to follow her wishes; and later, she isn’t above manipulating and cajoling Dov into seeing himself as the mastermind of her complicated plot. But as played by Levieva, Anika’s secret plan is all too obvious from the beginning. She’s a two-dimensional femme fatale: Levieva has the blank stare and robotic delivery of a smug narcissist too accustomed to surviving to give a thought to anyone else.
Whenever she’s offstage, the acting picks up considerably. Rothenberg, who spends the entire first act sharing the stage with her, is stymied until he’s free of her in the second. In the Nuremberg bakery, he’s exactly the charming and icy stranger one would suspect of glazing bread with arsenic. And Driver and Milioti, who have an exquisite rapport in their parry-and-thrust conversations during the first act, practically throw up their hands when saddled with Levieva in their second act scenes. Milioti, in particular, is a disappointment as her vivid, subtle performance gives way to a shrill naiveté and innocence opposite Levieva.
Director Leigh Silverman at least keeps the show moving (the complicated set changes are handled with efficiency and skill), though she does tend to leave her actors in stasis too often. Driver and Milioti keep their scenes crackling with energy despite remaining seated in a train compartment, but Levieva has no technique to fall back on. And her final moment on stage is a painfully staged attempt to reach some level of tragic dignity that falls flat, leaving Levieva sitting on the floor, legs akimbo, shoving pastries into her mouth like a panel from an old Cathy comic strip.
Through Sept 27. At Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $65.
