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The English Bride

Reviewed by Tom Provenzano

The Road Theatre on Magnolia

Through April 26

RECOMMENDED:

Superb acting magnifies the already swelling tension in Lucile Lichtblau’s fact-based script portraying the events of a failed airline bombing. The backdrop concerns a maladroit would-be Arab-Israeli terrorist Ali (Steven Schub), who exploits his sadly gullible working-class British fiancé Eileen (Elizabeth Knowelden). Lichtblau’s tightly woven conceit creates a series of unreliable memory scenes as the couple is separately interrogated by Israeli inquisitor Dov (Allen Wasserman).

Dov is alternately avuncular, frightening or repellant, depending on his momentary mode of manipulation. With Eileen he is all smiles and concern, encouraging her to open up about her last-chance romance with a swarthy foreigner. Knowelden’s creates a willful naïveté, mining uneasy laughs through her character’s artlessness. In Dov’s behavior with Ali, director Marya Mazor has created a skin-crawling interdependence between the hostile Jew and Arab, as the interrogator takes every chance he can to physically, almost sexually, manhandle his captive – to which Ali smugly refuses to respond. Ultimately violence is the only language that breaks him down.

The action flows seamlessly from scenes in prison to memories of the pair’s courtship, which involves turning Eileen into a proper Muslim woman with a veil that she finds “bloody sexy.” A stark stage with only a few chairs and a suitcase underscore a constant sense of unease – then halfway through the play, an explosion of images (designed by Kaitlyn Pietras) projected on a series of rear screens raise the stakes visually. Pablo Santiago’s dim lighting on Pietras monochromatic grey set and Sarah Ryung Clement’s costume design that rarely moves beyond beiges and browns, concretize the production’s austerity.

Quite by design, no sense of truth or reconciliation is achieved by the end. Only a series of questions remains about the relationship between truth and lies in the darkest aspects of our world.

The Road Theatre Company at The Road on Magnolia; Noho Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Thurs., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 pm; Sun., 7 p.m.; through April 26, www.roadtheatre.org