The deliberately ambiguous play is as alluring in theory as it is difficult to enact in practice: the production must keep the audience invested in its suspenseful limbo; the script must deliver a payoff satisfactory enough to justify the willful obscurity preceding it. Pitfalls, pretension, and shortcuts to failure pave the way, yet the challenge remains irresistible, largely because of successes like Fugue, now in its world premiere by The New Theatre Project. This haunting, expressive journey by playwright Audra Lord and director T. Luna Alexander wanders with purpose through a murky story abyss, incrementally raising the unease and the stakes as it pushes quirky details into a luridly affecting context.
The word fugue has several meanings, and the interminable miasma of a fugue state is well met by the disquieting atmosphere of the show’s design. Translucent panels neatly subdivide Keith Paul Medelis’s boldly stark setting, with a row of chambers that leave the performers still discernible in offstage holding patterns. In tandem with the unpredictable ambient and downcast lights by designer Janine Woods Thoma and mostly blank costumes by Ben Stange, the colorless surroundings have a curious antiseptic constancy. The presence of a kindly but aloof nurse (Dan Johnson) adds further implication as to the play’s framework, suggestive of a mental health retreat or, more formidably, a psychological experiment. And indeed, the four patients in residence seem well worthy of study, if for no other reason than they can’t remember how they got there — or anything else about themselves.
Musically, the fugue is a piece featuring several melodies that play off each other and intertwine, and these are represented here by the these strangers, both figuratively (in terms of story) and literally (with interjection by sound designers Ben Berg and Matt Justice and composition by Stephanie Loveless, under music director Melissa Coppola). The audience makes discoveries in tandem with the characters, who begin the play as blank slates gingerly interacting with their environment and each other. Encounters between Julie (Jamie Weeder) and James (Jon Ager) are engagingly dissonant; she wants nothing but her sketchbook for company, but can’t stop drawing the same face, while his mood skitters and careens. Oddball Tina (Linda Rabin Hammell) is better equipped to be in the figurative dark, as she pores over every possibility and nugget of discovery with hilarious batty enthusiasm. The final resident is Princess Stephanie (Medelis), whose identity as a transsexual celebrity rock star remains firmly imprinted, to the apparent exclusion of any other self.
Apart from a handful of half-gone memories and a few tantalizing moments of correlation, this is all the audience is allowed to know for a long time. The biggest risk of Lord’s ambiguous script is its incredible patience, which is happily paired with the uneasy expectation that this is all leading somewhere. Her unknowable world is entrenched in talking, but not merely telling; the really important reveals are organically ingrained and arrived at incrementally. Weeder’s terrified recoiling from moments of recognition, Hammell’s riotous crowing with imagination run wild, Medelis’s gentle satiety beneath the playfully superior veneer, Ager’s meeting the creeping suspicion that his former self was a bad person with forceful ignorance — the underlying characters are fully formed, keeping the interactions riveting even in light of the prevailing abstraction. As the eighty-five-minute single act pushes on, the impatience of not knowing is insistently coupled with trepidation that the eventual illumination may be worse. Such ignorance and dread is a complicated feeling to engender and sustain, and Alexander and company pull it off with exceptional finesse. For her part, Lord slowly and painstakingly follows through with the promised connections, and in keeping with the corollary between risk and reward, the device is heartrending.
The adamant elusiveness of Fugue is too distinctive for broad-based appeal; even in the most accommodating circumstances, this kind of play demands rapt attention even as it remains stingy with reveals, which is more than some are willing to put into a night of theater. However, Lord’s script has two major strengths that abundantly reward the willing viewer: confidence in its unhurried build, backed by strong character portraits, and a definitive conclusion that justifies and upholds the intrigue preceding it. What’s more, this bold and enthralling production does justice to the text, especially in its complex, sometimes tortured characterizations that would surely blossom further upon repeat viewing.