Everything Without Exception

Vertebrae Theatre; ends Sat., Feb. 26

The Implied Violence ensemble wants to shake the sense out of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and by the looks of it, they made a great start. Walking into their dauntingly remote Pioneer Square studio is like wading into the compulsive muck of someone’s imploded memories: A large overhanging canopy is obsessively embroidered with old snapshots, dried or dead flowers are arranged about the room, and dangling from the ceiling are old shoes, cassette tapes, toys, and other ephemera that must at one time have meant something in somebody’s life. The set seems the ideal place to riff on, and rifle through, the tattered anguish buried in Eugene O’Neill’s bruised family recollection.

Unfortunately, what this collaborative effort makes of this divinely decayed playground doesn’t end up resembling too much more than an innovative rehearsal technique, something an idiosyncratic university theater professor might have requested his cast try in order to better embody the ugly subtext of O’Neill’s surpassing lyricism. The production consists of several passages that begin and end with the sound of a ghostly foghorn and the sight of four performers (Michael Draper, Ryan Mitchell, Mandie O’Connell, and Jack StockLynn) at a tense, tightly choreographed family dinner. Private, frantic whispers are simultaneously hissed, napkins are snapped open in unison, and the cast, dressed in scrumbly, layered disarray, proceeds to engage in heavily breathed movement phrases, ritualistic game playing, and the occasional suffered spouting of familiar dialogue from the O’Neill play. (“She seems perfectly all right this morning.” “You think I’m going to die, don’t you?” “Let’s not kid each other, Papa,” etc.)

For a while, the piece’s adamant oddness, its insistence on rattling you with half-sentences and off-kilter pas de quatre, has a striking braveness, but it devolves into just a lot of huffing, and the show is ultimately so shapeless that you fear you may either end up sitting there all night—never a good premonition— or that, perhaps, it will just end at any moment and you won’t be aware it’s over until you see the actors bowing. (For the record, it’s the latter: The piece runs under an hour.) The idea to wrangle with the jagged, nervy emotions rustling beneath O’Neill’s reminiscences by creating a jagged, nervy physical manifestation of those emotions is a rather fine one, and you have to admire the evident risk and discipline the troupe has taken to experiment with it. But the experiment remains just an experiment, and the reminiscences remain O’Neill’s own—the ensemble hasn’t staked its claim on the material and doesn’t arrive at any new understanding of it. At the end of the evening, the quartet looks tossed and tired, on the outside looking into a world of hurt. STEVE WIECKING

Twelfth Night

Freehold’s East Hall Theatre; ends Sat., March 5

It’s amazing what a little enthusiasm gets you. Well applied and tempered by a sharp sense of humor, enthusiasm has the power to trump a host of pitfalls—whether stylistic or just incidental (i.e., flubs)—and envelop you in the obvious sense of fun being had. The cast of Ghost Light Theatricals exhibits oodles of enthusiasm in this production of Shakespeare’s light, gender-bending comedy, which director Michael Thompson has cleverly (if a bit slapdashedly) set in the swinging ’70s.

Here, the era is more a state of mind than a series of signifiers, more Laugh-In than Saturday Night Fever. Thompson takes an almost vaudevillian approach to the whole production: Tyler Rhodes (who is excellent as Feste) does a preshow stand-up routine complete with silly magic tricks, and a piano-and-guitar combo (Ethan Wagner and Wiley Young) provides background tinkling as well as accompaniment to the many musical numbers. The show itself is heavy on gags and full of slapstick, with the result that a previously cohesive narrative feels more like a series of spontaneous, drunken skits executed after hours at the drama club. It’s a baggy, sprawling beast, and it shouldn’t work.

But it does. To a person, this young, lovely, talented cast displays the kind of amped-up irreverence that, in the right measure, reveals both the deepest form of respect and a winning confidence in their own capabilities. And despite the swarming, chaotic informality of the production, each actor carves his or her character into a well-defined, memorable creation. Especially good are Jaime Roberts as the cross-dressing Viola, and Bill Morrison as that retentive fool Malvolio. These performances—so generous, wry, and assured—maintain a comic tension that never threatens to tilt into puerile overindulgence or inanity. This is a smart, daring, high-energy production that is, paradoxically perhaps, relaxed in its execution. In other words, it’s just a good time. RICHARD MORIN