Dark victory

The ART's Nocturne hits powerful notes

by Carolyn Clay

NOCTURNE, by Adam Rapp. Directed by Marcus Stern. Set design by Christine Jones. Costumes by Viola Mackenthun. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by David Remedios. With Dallas Roberts, Nicole Pasquale, Candice Brown, Will LeBow, and Marin Ireland. Presented by American Repertory Theatre New Stages at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through October 29.

"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister," begins the narrator of Nocturne, shooting us out of a gun, as it were, on an agonizing journey into purgatory. Novelist-turned-playwright Adam Rapp wrote the piece as a monologue in four movements and a coda, almost as if it were a musical composition. But at the Hasty Pudding Theatre, where the play is getting its world premiere courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre, Rapp's limbo is viewed through the Looking Glass. It takes the form of a series of stately, startling almost-still-lifes as the protagonist -- in a heartbreaking performance by Dallas Roberts -- grows to accommodate grief and its changes of weather.

"Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse," the narrator concludes. "It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. . . . The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery." The language in Nocturne is visceral and, literally, a saving grace; the protagonist uses words, literature, as a lifeboat. Director Marcus Stern's production gives the lifeboat shape -- though not always the same shape the words project. This affords the work an extra dimension, in which perception and memory can disengage -- like the innocent little girl of her brother's dreaming, who was divorced from her head by a fluke accident on a Leave It to Beaver afternoon.

When the poster outside the theater depicts a dark-eyed, pigtailed child holding her noggin like a Halloween pumpkin, you don't expect Wendy Wasserstein. And indeed, Nocturne is a painful, if also lyrical and surreal, experience. Rapp's racked hero may talk too much, but what has he other than words? His own and those of the masters, their very names intoned like rhythmic totems as the traumatized 17-year-old who ran over his sister flees to New York, takes a job in a bookshop, and crawls out of his numbness over the cobblestones of its wares. "Literature proves to be a great escape," he announces, proceeding to list two dozen authors' names -- from James Baldwin to Michael Ondaatje -- as if they constituted a healing incantation.

Stern sets Nocturne in boxes, beginning with a blood-red one in which the narrator describes the accident, with his tiny sister, in party dress and sneakers, at the opposite corner of the stage. Later, there is a vertical square of floor on which the narrator sits, somehow not spilling out, in a claw-footed bathtub amid a sea of books. In a glowing rectangle like a picture frame at the back of the stage, the sister's corpse lies in state: Snow White in her glass coffin. Years later, our "resilient narrator" -- as he calls himself after moving to New York and seeking the protection of the third person -- will return to this same cramped box to visit his dying father, a shattered man who, when last seen, shoved a revolver into his son's mouth. "The taste of it still haunts me," remembers the narrator. "You can suck on a penny and get pretty close."

If Nocturne has a fault, it is that it's more narrative than drama -- a fault the ART staging, with its conjuration of characters other than the narrator, its ghostly visuals, and its now jumpy, now hypnotic sound design, minimizes. But Rapp's language has an acute, corporeal life of its own. At the ART, newcomer Roberts, a Juilliard-trained actor who has been with Nocturne since its initial reading, gives an almost unbearable performance full of boyish anguish and Dave Eggers-like Gen X-stamped insouciance. Even as he retreats into a skewed, monastic life in Gotham, buffeted by alcohol and irony, he remains the heartbroken boy alienated from his history until he turns it into "a kind of amorphous passage of words." The other players are, for the most part, evocative wallpaper, though Will LeBow does a searing turn as the dying father, shedding tight-lipped tears, his pajama'd chest undulating like a bird's. But the real star is new dramatist Rapp, playing a Nocturne that will echo long after the last careful, clinical note is sounded.