Sjalusi (Jealousy)

Reviewed by Bill Raden

In the 15- years of their existence, Teater Manu, Norway’s state theater for the deaf, has tackled playwrights as diverse as Henrik Ibsen and Alan Ayckbourn, Sophocles and Shakespeare, and has even produced original work written in Norwegian Sign Language.

For their U.S. debut, however — in a co-production with L.A. sponsors Deaf West — Teater Manu bypasses the usual canon of stage-writer suspects for this curio of a 1999 sex farce from the Argentinian anti-feminist and 1970s enfant terrible, Esther Vilar.

As an international theater introduction, Sjalusi (Jealousy) makes for a decidedly bizarre how-do-you-do.

Like Ayn Rand before her, Vilar has stage ambitions which amount to little more than dramatizing a reactionary thesis first laid out in her 1971 tract The Manipulated Man, which posited that, although woman is the physical and intellectual inferior to man, it is women’s sexual manipulation of men that gives them ultimate supremacy in the power relations between the sexes.

Staged by director Magne Brevik in the manner of a vaudeville burlesque, Sjalusi focuses on the sexual intrigue among three professional women living in the same high-rise apartment building — the 55-year-old attorney Helen (Mira Zuckerman); the 40-year-old architect Yana (Ipek D. Mehlum); and the 25-year-old yoga teacher Iris (Anne-Line Kirste) — as each woman in turn steals the affections and possession of Helen’s schlump of a husband, Lazlo (Olgeir J. Hartvedt).

In traditional sex farce, the snowballing comedy of errors is driven by the protagonist’s desperation to preserve a petit bourgeois dignity put at risk by a sexual indiscretion. Sjalusi, however, takes aim at the complacency of its three heroines as each comes to be exposed as a venial and jealous creature whose sense of self can only be completed by a man, who is made all the more attractive because he is desired by other women.

Vilar gives hubby Lazlo a moral pass for his fickle loyalties, because, as one of the women points out, he “is a man who is simply following his biological instinct of moving from the older to the younger woman.”

With most of the dramatic scenes playing out between the women as ASL-signed email exchanges (actor Kjersti Fjeldstad voices live translations for the hearing abled), the production has the somewhat glossier feel of a Hal Roach silent two-reeler, albeit with its more trenchant ironies visually underscored by Agata Wisny’s witty video projections.

Unfortunately, even at 70 minutes and despite the accomplished ensemble’s fine performances, Vilar’s puddle-deep philosophizing never connects with the kind of laughs that might tempt one to ignore the play’s unsavory political provenance or to feel that one has experienced more than a risibly insubstantial evening of European kitsch.

Teater Manu (Norway) and Deaf West Theatre at [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m.; through May 4. (818) 762-2998, www.deafwest.org

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