The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime Play Review
Theater Review
Plotting the Grid of Sensory Overload
Alex Sharp and Enid Graham in "The Curious Incident of the Domestic dog in the Dark-Fourth dimension," a new Broadway play that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.
Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times-
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Alex Sharp and Enid Graham in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Dark-Time," a new Broadway play that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.
Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Dark-Fourth dimension
- NYT Critic's Pick
- Broadway, Play
- 2 hrs. and 30 min.
- Closing Engagement:
- Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 Due west. 47th St.
- 212-239-6200
E'er had one of those days in the city when you feel like you forgot to put your skin on? Sure you have. Information technology happens when you oasis't slept, or you drank too much the nighttime earlier, or you've been brooding over bad news.
All your senses, it seems, take been heightened to a painful acuity; your nerve endings are standing on guard. And every ane of the manifold sights and sounds of urban life registers as a personal assault. You're a walking target in a war zone, and that subway ride that awaits you looms similar a descent into hell.
Such a land of beingness is conjured with dazzling effectiveness in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Fourth dimension," which opened on Sunday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Adapted by Simon Stephens from Marker Haddon's acknowledged 2003 novel near an autistic boy'due south coming-of-age, this is one of the most fully immersive works ever to wallop Broadway.
So be prepared to have all your emotional and sensory buttons pushed, including a few y'all may have not known existed. Every bit directed past Marianne Elliott (a Tony winner for the genius tear-jerker "State of war Horse"), with a product that retunes the way yous see and hear, "Curious Incident" can be shamelessly manipulative.
But more than than any mainstream theater production I know, it forces you to prefer, wholesale, the bespeak of view of someone with whom you may initially feel you take piddling in common. That's Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old mathematical genius for whom walking down the street or property a conversation is a herculean challenge.
Played by the recent Juilliard school graduate Alex Abrupt, in the kind of corking Broadway debut immature actors classically dream nearly, Christopher is in some ways a parent's nightmare. He hates beingness touched, is bewildered by the common clichés of small talk and is sent into cataclysmic tantrums by any violation of his rigidly ritualized world.
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But he has a distinct advantage over almost of us, and he knows it. "I run across everything," he says, while looking out the window during the start train ride of his life. "Nigh other people are lazy.
"They never look at everything," he continues. "They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in nigh the same management." The pulsating show that surrounds him insists that nosotros feel every bit fully as possible both the privilege and the penalisation of seeing everything.
Mr. Haddon's novel is written in the offset person, and translating a subjective point of view into external reality is e'er catchy. As we follow Christopher'due south attempts to solve a local mystery — the murder of the dog next door — Mr. Stephens employs an assortment of narrative devices to continue us within his mind.
Well-nigh prominent among these is the utilize of a special-pedagogy teacher, Siobhan (Francesca Faridany), equally an intermediary between Christopher, her student, and the audience. In the first deed, she reads to usa from Christopher's diarylike account, which he has obviously written at her request.
At the beginning of the second deed, she makes it articulate that she has persuaded Christopher to turn his story into a play. This inevitably leads to a slightly cloying and hoary theatrical self-consciousness, with Christopher bossing around the performers of his mini-memoir.
Nonetheless the use of Siobhan as a tutelary stage manager bothered me less than it did when I saw "Curious Incident" in London (where it opened in 2012 and is still running, afterwards picking up a slew of Olivier Awards). This is partly because the angular Ms. Faridany brings a welcome sharpness to the part.
Just it is also considering Mr. Sharp'due south Christopher, unlike Luke Treadaway'south equally good but more shiveringly vulnerable version in London, seems to own the play so completely. Anybody, even the helpful and intrusive Siobhan, registers as a product of his imagination.
The people around him, embodied by a winning ensemble of everyday chameleons (including the starting time-charge per unit Ian Barford and Enid Graham every bit Christopher's parents), are his personal reconceptions of their real-life prototypes. We all employ a like translation procedure in dealing with others, whether we acknowledge information technology or not.
And like Christopher, we are all continually trying to impose internal symmetry on the bewildering world outside. The great achievement of "Curious Incident" lies in how information technology turns the stage into the ordering mechanism of Christopher'south mind.
The splendid design team — which includes Bunny Christie (set and costumes), Paule Constable (lighting), Finn Ross (video) and Ian Dickinson (audio) — gives u.s. that mind equally a sort of mathematical variation on the basic black box theater, with the walls of the set lined like graph newspaper. As Christopher navigates his mode through an increasingly unfamiliar landscape, both physical and emotional, the arcs of his adventures are fatigued into existence.
And so are the shards of sensory overload. Life is messy in means that graphs cannot adapt. And when chaos comes, "Curious Incident" renders it in harrowing, meticulously detailed tours de force, whether the setting is a London subway or the room at dwelling in which Christopher uncovers a cache of messages he didn't know existed.
It's not all sound and light, though, that allow us entry into Christopher'southward perspective. The choreographers Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett turn the bandage members into a heaving sea of humanity that thwarts and threatens to consume Christopher.
The realization of more individual interactions, particularly betwixt the impact-allergic young man and his parents, is often heartbreaking. These impuissant, hopeful moments get metaphors (to utilize a term Christopher loathes) for the pure, aching endeavor of making a connection with everyone else.
Since the play is a detective story (its title comes from a Sherlock Holmes tale), I won't say much more about its central mysteries. (There are more than than one.) Every bit is the fashion of shadowy conundrums, they tend to shrink when exposed to the lite.
Yet while this is brazenly a feel-good bear witness (I'm sorry to tell you that a winsome puppy figures in its denouement), information technology wisely allows room for a lingering darkness. "It's going to be all correct," grown-ups keep telling Christopher in bruised, self-betraying voices.
No, it's not. And on some level, Christopher volition always know this, more piercingly that we can unremarkably afford to acknowledge. That doesn't stop him, or us, from basking in the triumphant glow of making information technology through the eternal obstruction class that is his — and our — daily life.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/theater/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time-opens-on-broadway.html
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