Blood Without Guts

JACOBEAN PLAYWRIGHTS took their violence seriously. Their morals were usually straightforward enough, but when it came time to rivet the message solidly in the audience's mind, nothing worked like a little blood. Murder, ghosts, mutilation, alchemy, infidelity: these were the playwright's moral tools, and they incidentally made for spectacular theater as well.

Thomas Middleton managed to pack every one of these devices into the main plot of The Changeling, the story of a gentlewoman whose refusal to marry according to her father's wishes plunges her into a tangle of murder and deceit. It's not a deep play, and except for a few climactic moments the poetry isn't particularly inspired. But it is a thrilling blood-and-thunder melodrama. The Leverett House production succeeds when director Wendy Smith and the actors swallow their doubts and accept this fact, playing some of the gruesome scenes in a high-serious stage manner that would be hard to believe if it weren't so gripping.

But often the cast plays for laughs instead. Daniel Terris as De Flores--the misshapen servant to the heroine, and villain of the play--mars what might have been a superb overall performance by childishly pouting in his early scenes. De Flores lusts after his mistress Beatrice (Anne Montgomery) and offers to kill the husband her father intends for her. She accepts and her complicity in this crime draws her into a whirlpool of moral corruption.

Terris plays this key murder scene comically, leaving the audience laughing at the victim instead of quaking for him. It is funny, but it makes the rest of the play hard to take seriously; when De Flores cuts off the dead man's finger to remove a ring, the "crack!" that snaps through the theater is as ludicrous as it is horrid.

But the real problem with the Leverett production is at the same time one of its great strengths: Smith chooses to omit the entire comic subplot of the play written by collaborator William Rowley (without which the title is nearly meaningless). This leaves the play almost unbelievably short--the whole thing takes an hour-and-a-half, including a 15-minute intermission and scene changes. Along with the director's rapid-fire pacing of the scenes, this insures that The Changeling won't give audiences an overdose of post-Shakespearean blank verse--which most of the actors cope well with anyway.

Bereft of these comic scenes, the Leverett show was free to be a brief but potent spectacle of violent tragedy. Instead the performers seen to feel they have to make up for the comedy lost when the subplot was cut. In the process they dilute the effectiveness of the best melodramatic scenes.

In the cast's defense, however, it should be noted that some of Middleton's lines would draw nothing but laughter from modern audiences, even in the hands of brilliant performers. And at some moments the Leverett House group does give us a taste of sensational horror. De Flores returns to Beatrice after the murder and presents her with the severed ring-cum-finger, still bleeding in a white handkerchief. Both Terris and Montgomery play the tableau to the hilt, he leering, she screaming. Afterwards, the tension becomes oppressive as the walks slowly, step by step across the tiny stage towards her, blackmailing her to give in to his lust. If the actors would take the menace in The Changeling as seriously throughout as hey do in this scene, the play would become a real thrill instead of just light entertainment.

Montgomery, of all the cast members, understands best how to maintain the high-serious pose the play calls for. Her performance, alternating between jumpy nervousness and despondency, offers a coherence that Terris's, though striking at moments, lacks.

Most of the supporting roles are competent, but lack individual character. Gaughan and Richard Blumenfeld as Jasperino both and a little spice to their scenes; but the real surprise comes from Peter Knapp as Alsemero, the nobleman Beatrice really loves. Knapp is a sleeper, underacting so much that he is almost unnoticeable for most of the play. But when he learns of his beloved's infidelity, he seems to come out of nowhere and shake the beams in the Leverett theater's ceiling with his bellow, "You are a whore!"

The conditions of the Leverett Old Theater would work against the performers, even if they did not try to act more consistently in the grand manner and take Middleton seriously. The stage is miniscule--the audience within a few feet of the actors. Something less intimate and more imposing might work better: The Changeling really calls for grand-operatic treatment--big gestures, declamation and all. Instead of entering wholeheartedly into this approach, or finding some other basis for their actions, the actors root themselves motionless on the stage most of the time to deliver their lines.

Certainly Joe Mooilia's set does the most any could to suggest grandness within small confines; the single backdrop quickly converts from a coldstone exterior to blood-red chambers. But Christopher Stone's blinding lighting consistently works at cross-purposes to the script. Nothing would help keep the show scary more than gloom at the right moments.

As presented, The Changeling is a brief and pleasant mixture of drollness and terror. But the two don't mix well, and we inevitably lose come of the shock value of the play's blood if we're too bad everyone working on the show couldn't agree to squeeze out every last drop of melodrama.