Amazing to look at, perplexing to hear, The Da Vinci Code' heads into its final week at IRT.
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| Even devoid of human figures, the set suggests multiple ways in. |
Late into its run, I took in a stage adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," Indiana Repertory Theatre's season opening production. It will travel to two other theaters later this season.
For this one, it meant unaccustomed catching up, which seems quite suitable to a play that prioritizes catching up to what has been revealed before. The audience is put virtually into the skins and minds of the far-flung characters as a murder mystery turns out to enfold the secret of the ages in Western civilization.
Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, based on Dan Brown's novel of the same title, the technically splendid production runs through next Sunday at the IRT. Benjamin Hanna directed the show, revealing the sort of manipulative precision that enables some people to solve a Rubik's cube in a dazzling total of seconds.
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| Dan Brown's recurrent professor, Robert Langdon |
I don't know how much help the script provides into locking everything into place, but this show is literally multifaceted in its presentation. Each phase of the mystery, including several sudden appearances of an aimed revolver, shifts the task facing protagonist Robert Langdon (Nate Cheeseman) onto a new level of challenge and interpretation. He's a Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconography, such that cluing the audience in to what his academic specialty entails makes the expertise of projection designer Katherine Freer a central feature of the scenic design, by Christopher and Justin Swader.
With Langdon's professional stature reliant upon interpretation of matters hidden from the world, any project he plunges into draws riches and further questions from the labyrinth of his mind. The case here is the after-hours Louvre Museum murder of Jacques Sauniere, a curator whose professional knowledge of art and invention (Leonardo Da Vinci in particular) involves familiarity with the occult and a dangerous secret kept by the One True Church. How could you not be intrigued? Intrigue is woven into both Sauniere's job description and his biography. It's thus a happy hunting ground for Langdon, played by Nate Cheeseman with a flawless sense of duty fueled by curiosity.
The cast I saw, with understudy Ian Cruz stepping in for Sean Blake as the sleuth Bezu Fache of the French version of the FBI, had not a theatrical hair out of place. What I would question about this type of story is how subordinate any personality, no matter how clearly signaled, is to the the story's needs. Every role is plugged into place, and the dialogue, much of which sounds just too calculated, bears burdens that also seem to be placed on it by the way Brown writes his novels, even when he has a potentially wide expanse of narrative strategies to explore.
Here's a key to Dan Brown's use of dialogue and narrative:
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| We learn lots when Sauniere's granddaughter and Langdon talk. |
"Brown’s use of dialogue is another notable aspect of his style. He often uses conversations between characters as a vehicle for exposition, helping to explain complex historical and scientific concepts in a way that feels natural and engaging. This is particularly evident in his detailed descriptions and background information, which are usually delivered through dialogue rather than lengthy narrative exposition."
Plays of course depend on dialogue to carry most of their meaning. This has drawn the scorn of at least two modern novelists insisting that the spoken word, rehearsed and interpretively nuanced, is too remote to ever present human behavior and story in full dimensionality. John Updike doubted that dialogue designed to be honed in performance, rehearsed over and over again, could ever represent what is said a particular way in any real-life context.
Martin Amis was even more severe, asserting that dialogue is a minor feature of the most genuine storytelling, especially in the long-form prose of the novel, and that Shakespeare is the only exception among dramatists. (When the good son Edgar says "Ripeness is all," he is expressing concise, self-aware wisdom he shares with his blinded father Gloucester. It's a revelation unrelated to the "King Lear" plot. This is why Harold Bloom credits Shakespeare with "the invention of the human," a phrase that had some critics complaining about the professor's Bardolatry.)
To Amis, playwrights are thus specialists in a secondary form of literary expression, pretending that the rehearsed spoken word can convey what human behavior is all about and, with training and good directions, give it a veneer of spontaneity.
As a theater-lover, I don't subscribe to this novelist snobbery. But I have to say that the Brown manner, already threatened with overload in his novels, in a stage adaptation like this one bears the world on its shoulders implausibly. Atlas can't shrug. The usual tying together of loose ends that playwrights arrange in the final scenes of any form of mystery or comedy is here so extensive as to make much of the genuine work of acting superfluous. Here, these actors have mastered their craft, even if some of their lines sound formulaic, part of a Q-and-A session.
Basically, as Ricky Ricardo charged Lucy, they got some 'splainin' to do, and the cast's main job is to complete the narrative in the manner the work's creators have piled on them, giving the audience a series of "ah, ha!" moments. And sure enough, the actors stay in character, complete with accents (mostly French) as required, as the revelations unroll.
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| IRT cast in final scene, no spoilers remaining |
Characters sometimes make ghostly appearances, especially Sauniere (Ryan Artzberger). The lighting is essential to the phantasmagoria that pervades the story. The real triumph of theatrical presentation here is the look of everything, not the tonnage of verbiage the characters unload. Yet there's gold in those veins of ore.
[Photos by Zack Rosing]
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