Curtain Call:

ANDREI SERBAN has staged an average of one production of season for the American Repertory Theatre--more than any other director, including the theater's founder and artistic director, Robert Brustein. As familiarity breeds contempt, especially in high culture, we might conclude that there is something wrong with him. Why would any real world-class auteur hang around Harvard Square? Robert Wilson seems only to spend scattered weeks here between breakfast meetings in Vladivostok and fundraisers in Kuala Lumpur. Now, there, there's an artiste.

Sweet Table at the Richelieu

Written by Ronald Ribman

Directed by Andrei Serban

At the Loeb Drama Center through March 15

However, whatever reasons Serban has for returning again and again to Cambridge--maybe he likes the weather, who knows--we should be thankful for them. Every production he has staged, from a frenetic Sganarelle done with wooden poles and bedsheets to his Wilsonesque The Juniper Tree with its giant, inexplicable rhinocerous, has been original and rewarding. He has no distinctive stylistic trademark other than a fertile imagination and a refreshingly practical understanding of the stage and stage practice. His one consistent method, common with auteur directors, has been to rely on classic texts. A playwright can't argue with a ground-breaking interpretation of his text when he's been dead for a century.

So I can imagine a hypothetical moment during the rehearsals of Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Serban's latest with the A.R.T., when playwright Ronald Ribman offers a comment from the corner and Serban jumps a foot into the air with fright. The result of his first collaboration with a pre-immortal is a production that is far more textually-oriented than the followers of Serban and the A.R.T. are accustomed, presented with a restrained staging that supports the material, infusing it, as the stage is supposed to do, with life.

Ribman, the author of Journey of the Fifth Horse and Cold Storage, has conjured up the Richelieu, a baroque spa somewhere in the mountains of Europe, and he has populated it with a selection of guests who have the cultural and ethnic diversity of a World War II movie bomber crew: the French gigolo; the Levantine low-life; Mimosa Klein, the Jewish poet from Wellesley; and more, including Cesare Bottivicci, the Italian mutant prognosticator. The physical and emotional excess of these characters matches their surroundings, particularly the immense sweet table itself, laden with creamy goodies and attended by bewigged and powdered servants.

The play unfolds around the relatively silent and austere Jeanine Cendrars, played with an otherworldly grace by the avant-garde dancer Lucinda Childs. Mrs. Cendrars is discovered wandering through the snowy woods at the curtain, lost, having "taken a wrong turn. "She is "rescued" and whisked, almost against her will, to the lobby of the Richelieu, where she finds a warm welcome and her luggage--which she never sent--waiting for her.

The hotel seems unfixed in time as well as place. Instead of a history it has a tradition of sumptuous meals, sleigh rides, and genteel conversation. The guests, too, seem determined to erase their pasts, or at least alter them so as to erase some present pain. The deepest, darkest secret is Mrs. Cendrars', it seems, and the revelations in the dessert room all might be part of a nightmare dreamed by her, growing from her secret.

Atypically for the A.R.T., this is a play that relies on the quality of ensemble performances for its success, and even more atypically, it works. The acting is almost uniformly excellent; and Serban has proven that he can work with living actors as well as masks and puppets. The direction relies heavily on the power of gesture to further the dramatic development, and it is done so skillfully that the manner in which a hand is moved across space may strike home profoundly. The new additions to the A.R.T.'s permanent company all appear form this production to augment it, especially Nestor Serrano, Harriet Harris, Sandra Shipley, and even ex-"White Shadow" Ken Howard, who projects a majestic solemnity as Bottivicci, the deformed mindreader.

THE PLAY is far from perfect. There are long stretches of dialogue where Ribman replaces invention with swatches of poetic mish-mash; and there is one character, a Mrs. Karras, who cannot have any other reason for existing except to provide a contracted actress with a job for the evening. And in a few instances Serban gives in to the urge to be maddeningly and incongruously ambiguous, as when he has two characters enter from a glowing portal set in a huge tapestry depicting a boar hunt. You think of the Juniper Tree rhinoceri and shake your head.

All faults aside, the A.R.T. should be proud of this production and proud also that their season of six shows includes three by living American playwrights. Sweet Table at the Richelieu is a surreal tea-time, a peculiar mediation on memory and decay that owes as much to Milan Kundera as it does to Chekhov. It is not quite the "penetrating tale of nobility and charlatanism... guaranteed to keep you engrossed, hypnotised--and dazzled by rich language and seductive images" that the A.R.T. brochure touts. It is, however, a generally intelligent skillful, and well-written piece of theater, and that is more than enough.