The Illusion

Grabbing a series subscription to the Signature Theater's season of Tony Kushner plays was the best $100 I spent this year. I was ecstatic to see Angels in America on stage for the first time and incredibly eager to see his new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to blah blah blah. I confess I wasn't especially interested in his adaptation of Pierre Corneille's The Illusion. I'd probably have chosen an earlier play that he wrote by himself over an adapted script. But damned if I didn't find delights in this oddball comedy about an old man who visits a witch's cave to get a glimpse into his estranged son's life.

I'm going to crib from the New York Times review (let's face it, Ben Brantley is a better writer than me by a million) to say that Tony Kushner is "one of the most linguistically luxuriant dramatists of our time." It's true. The dialogue here is verdant and lovely, and while some passages seem perhaps a little too archly theatrical, well...there's a reason for that. The pleasure of language is not what the show is ABOUT, but it becomes so. Almost any playwright, living or dead, would probably be the better for having Kushner adapt their dialogue. His writing exists in a space beyond realism where he captures the true rhythms of speech (even in a 17th century paranormal-ish comedy) but brings an extra clarity and specialness to the words his characters employ.

More than anything else, the play is a celebration of the theater, something apparent from the play's opening and growing more obvious as the night wears on. As the father peeks in on his son's life, we're treated to an adorable romantic farce whose denouement is ultimately less important than one would expect.

This is such a difficult play to discuss without ruining the whole thing. It's a bit of a souffle, I guess, light and airy and delicious, but just waiting for the air to be let out.

Rather than collapse the whole thing, I'll say that technically it's incredibly enchanting. From a submerged piano to a simple paper moon, the sets are wonderfully artificial in the most enchanting of ways. And the performances around them are very much of a piece. Of the younger set, Finn Wittrock and Merritt Wever are spirited standouts. Lois Smith as the witch Alcandre gets to deliver some lovely speeches and is always a joy to watch. And Peter Bartlett nearly walks off with the show as an aging buffoon whose ego is in full bloom.

And yet, I must offer one piece of frustration. The end of the play feels curiously slack. We build to a surprising revelation, but then...well, I'm not 100% sure where we go. The boundaries of the play change, it's magic becoming a bit more abstract, and how it ends seems to begin to erase what came before. So much of what we've seen is rendered unimportant to the larger goal that as delighted as I was to have been suckered by it, the aftertaste was somehow less rewarding. It seems that maybe Kushner got a bit carried away with his own conceit. Knowing how charming the product is, it's easy to see why, but it just seemed a touch less spectacular than I thought at first. Still, it was an exceedingly pleasant way to spend a few hours, and a nice end to a season whose earlier productions were more rewarding but were also more demanding.