Friday, February 17, 2006

'Dybbuk' Possesses Dazzling Moments
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer

Like a pressure system slowly gaining strength, the new adaptation of "The Dybbuk" at Theater J starts as a disorganized front and gathers into something with a focused, gale-force intensity.

The 80-minute piece, a collaborative project of Theater J and Synetic Theater, is the latest "movement play" by Synetic's inspired director, Paata Tsikurishvili, and his prodigiously talented wife, choreographer Irina Tsikurishvili. And as has become customary in their endeavors, this version of "The Dybbuk," based on traditional Jewish folk tales and an early 20th-century Yiddish play, includes moments of dazzling theatricality, such as when an ardent demon is exorcised from the body of a woman, or when a wedding erupts in a series of explosive dances.

Those interludes give the production a powerful, sensual patina and playgoers a compelling rationale for viewing the Tsikurishvilis' handiwork. But the evening is not without its drawbacks, particularly an unevenness in acting techniques and a choppy buildup to the show's most dynamic elements: the well-choreographed dance sequences and Irina Tsikurishvili's eye-popping dance solos.

The production includes the kinds of icily enchanting images, created out of the company's modest toolbox, that have become the Tsikurishvilis' trademark in works as varied as "Dracula" and their celebrated silent "Hamlet." Here, headstones -- Paata Tsikurishvili seems drawn, always, to the graveyard -- bob and twirl. Hebrew letters stamped on coin-shaped shields spin, like the swirling computations in "A Beautiful Mind." Spectral figures intrude eerily, through thick, rolling mist or a bolt of see-through fabric.

In "The Dybbuk," Paata Tsikurishvili continues to show that as a visual stylist with a head for telling a story through human gesture and an eye for cinematic staging he has no local competition. What he has yet to figure out, however, is how to make his plays' dialogue scenes half as engaging as the fabulous, signature movement. The problem, in part, might be casting. Finding actors who can meet Synetic's exacting physical standards and who are capable of inhabiting roles with a measure of subtlety is not always that easy, apparently.

On top of slow delivery, there are such clear divisions in technique between some of the performers that they seem to be appearing in different plays. And the contrasts between some Synetic veterans, such as Nathan Weinberger and Irakli Kavsadze, become, if anything, more pronounced over time. Weinberger speaks his lines in a familiarly flat, naturalistic style, while Kavsadze is floridly, even at times risibly expressive, in the manner of a performer specially gifted in physical comedy.

Singling them out is not intended to suggest that either does not belong. (Weinberger plays one of the Yeshiva students; Kavsadze, the father of a young woman, Leah, whose soul is usurped by her dead lover.) But the challenge that remains for this inventive and entertainingly ambitious company is to develop a verbal style that removes some of the jarring feeling of inconsistency.

Even with those nagging concerns, "The Dybbuk" shows off some of the best of what Synetic can do. All told, the serviceable script by Paata Tsikurishvili and Theater J's Hannah Hessel, which tends to teeter between passages of casual colloquialism and stodgy formality, efficiently ties together the mystical elements of this story of obsession and possession.

The supernatural core of "The Dybbuk" is ideal grist for the Tsikurishvilis' imaginations, carrying intimations of both "The Exorcist" and "The Phantom of the Opera." Leah, played by Irina Tsikurishvili, is innately passionate: When invited to kiss the synagogue's holy scrolls, she doesn't offer a chaste peck, but rather a voluptuous embrace. She falls just as hard for a brooding scholar, Chonnon (Andrew Zox), even though her father has promised her to the scion (Philip Fletcher) of a rich family. Chonnon, a student of the mystical Judaic precepts of Kabbalah -- like the tango, it seems, Kabbalah is "dangerous and forbidden" -- is her match in the commitment department. Denied Leah, he dies from grief.

"What happens to the soul of someone who dies before his time?" the stricken Leah says. She soon learns. Chonnon, trapped between this world and the next, wraps himself around Leah's soul, and the ways in which Paata Tsikurishvili dramatizes the possession and exorcism form one of the more electrifying sequences he's ever put onstage. Irina Tsikurishvili's Leah, portrayed in the play's early scenes as ethereally delicate, is transformed now into a snarling harridan. The stormy dance she performs to ruin her own wedding has a ferocious joy about it.

Even better is the liberation itself, in a scene lighted superbly by Colin K. Bills. For long stretches, it is Irina Tsikurishvili's job alone to convey Chonnon's imprisonment of Leah's spirit; we hear only Zox's disembodied voice. At the moment of Leah's unwilling separation from Chonnon, Zox joins Irina Tsikurishvili onstage, in a balletic intertwining. The freeing of Leah's soul comes in an unraveling of their bodies and a final, grippingly staged act of expulsion. It's as cathartic as a good exorcism gets.

Irina Tsikurishvili's dancing has never seemed more fluidly beautiful. Zox has the brooding good looks for Chonnon and imbues the character with a disturbed air that's easily identified as something beyond lovesickness. Fletcher gets a terrific moment in an athletic solo during the wedding. But Kavsadze and Armand Sindoni, the latter playing a visitor from the great beyond, unsettle the proceedings, with exaggerated expressions in Kavsadze's case and a cartoonishly booming voice in Sindoni's. Each might be advised to kick it down a notch.

It also might be time for the Tsikurishvilis to consider some other form of accompaniment than recorded music. Memorex is no match for a company that, so much of the time, is transcendently alive.