Stockholm 

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Triptych Theatre Group
Through January 28

RECOMMENDED

Among the ranks of serious-minded playwrights working today, there are few more serious (sometimes sledgehammerly so) than Bryony Lavery. Deeply influenced by fellow-Brit Caryl Churchill, Lavery has a special feeling for death and the perverse nature of fate. In her most famous play, Frozen, the pedophile-murderer of a young girl is revealed to have more in common with the mindset of the girl’s mother than one would ever have expected. In Dirt, a woman obsessed with cleanliness is killed by the very chemicals that carry out her obsession.

In ­Stockholm — winner of the 2008 John Whiting Award — we are introduced to Kali and Todd, contemporary singles who meet at a bar. Todd came to the bar with another woman, but Kali soon entices him away with promises of sexual pleasure — promises she makes good on, as she swiftly transports him to couples’ paradise, the planet of “us.”

The play takes place on Todd’s birthday, after the couple has been together for a while, carefully constructing a bubble of shared history and reference points that keeps everyone else out, including Todd’s importuning parents. They seem to exist happily inside this bubble as they contemplate their upcoming trip to Stockholm. But there is trouble in paradise, and we quickly get that Stockholm refers less to a city in Sweden than to a well-known syndrome.

Before we meet Kali and Todd, the audience is caught up in the last few minutes of Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal, which is projected onto the back wall of the playing space. The black-and-white film — which depicts the reign of death during the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, and the small family who is able to survive — is shown without subtitles, so the silvery images and Swedish dialogue wash over us without any sense of conscious narrative.

The reason for this soon becomes clear, as this is the film that Todd and Kali have just seen. It’s fed Kali’s recent obsession with all things Swedish, and spurred Todd to book a vacation for them in Stockholm. There are also several references to Bergman’s great film in the play, as well as several parallels in subject matter that I leave viewers to discover. (And yes, those character names — “Todd” means “death” in German, and “Kali” is the Hindu goddess of Death — see what I mean about “sledgehammer”?)

The transition from Bergman’s film to the intense couplings of Todd and Kali is not an easy one, and the early scenes are difficult to sink into. Plus, the play initially has an episodic quality owing to its being dramatized in “chapters,” and I feared at first that this was going to be a long 90 minutes (the show’s duration). And, honestly, the beginning is slow and a bit cumbersome — I kept thinking it would work better as a novel. But it pays to wait, because the show gets much better, and the director, cast and designers know what they’re doing.

Director Kim Rubinstein is very aware of the play’s weakness for literary tropes, and she does everything she can to physicalize the action and make it as dynamic and kinetic as she can. She’s wonderfully assisted in this by choreographer Stephen Buescher, who does amazing work throughout, but especially in these opening scenes. There is one sequence, in the transition from the bar to Todd’s apartment, that has to be seen to be believed. All I can say is that it concludes with Kimberly Alexander, who plays Kali, somehow defying gravity and walking horizontally across the back wall. Yes, that’s right — perpendicular to the floor. She’s assisted in this move by Jamie Wollrab (Todd), but for a moment I felt like I was at Cirque du Soleil, watching a world-class gymnastics duo. At the same time, what transpired was completely appropriate to the insanely intense nature of that emotional moment.

I love the scenic design by Anna Robinson — small bunches of dead flowers hanging from the lighting grid, and then an ingeniously constructed upscale kitchen in Todd’s apartment. And while Jamie Wollrab is very good as Todd, the shining star is Kimberly Alexander, dazzlingly fearless as Kali. Even at moments when I had questions about the character — how does Kali make a living or live in the world? — I never questioned Ms. Alexander’s commitment.  Sexy one moment, terrifying the next, she is, in a role baited with traps, everything that a playwright could ask for — truly the goddess Kali, as mystifying and irresistible as otherworldly beings should be.

The Pico, 10508 West Pico Blvd., West L.A.; Fri.-Sat. & Mon., 8 p.m.; Sun. 7 p.m.; through Jan. 28. stockholmla.brownpapertickets.com. Running time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.