ONE FLEA SPARE
By Naomi Wallace. Directed by David Wheeler. Set design by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Emily Dunn. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Music and sound design by Haddon Kime. With Eliza Rose Fichter, Robert Parsons, Stephen Mendillo, Lisa Richards, and James E. Berrier. At the New Repertory Theatre, Wednesday through Sunday through April 8.

Poetry and pustules co-exist in One Flea Spare — as do an unlikely quartet of humans thrown together in a 1665 London laid low by the bubonic plague. Playwright Naomi Wallace, a Kentucky transplant now living in the UK, is a lefty with a lyrical bent. And in One Flea Spare, she exploits the 17th-century plague crisis to upend rules of gender and class but also weaves from its horrors an unlikely poetry: violent, licentious, mordant, and grimly beautiful. Doubtless this will prove less surprising — if no less arresting — to those who recall the erotic involvement of a large, swinging side of beef in Wallace’s Slaughter City, which American Repertory Theatre produced in 1996.

One Flea Spare (which takes its name from John Donne’s poem “The Flea”) assumes the form of a series of scenes in which rigid lines of class and propriety melt in the urgent shadow of death and disease. The stripped-bare London home where a gentleman and his wife, along with two lower-class intruders, are quarantined serves as a microcosm of a world whose inviolate social structure, its pinions loosed by fear and desire, gives way. Less historical drama than fragmented, visceral fantasy, the play — which premiered at London’s Bush Theatre in 1995 and won an Obie in 1997 — is powerful stuff. And David Wheeler’s New Repertory Theatre production, its Boston premiere, ably carries its jumpy, discordant tune.

As is not immediately evident, the play is the recollection of a precocious, disarmingly fearless child named Morse, who has floated through hell on angel breath. Her countenance a ghostly, cherubic blank, she recalls a summer so hot that “vegetables stewed in their crates” and “rats drank the sweat from our faces” as the plague rampaged through London. Morse escapes this nightmare by tumbling through a broken window into the home of wealthy bureaucrat William Snelgrave and his clenched wife, Darcy. The Snelgraves have been unable to follow most of the gentry out of town because their servants inconvenienced them by dying in the house and placing them under quarantine. They are about to be sprung when Morse and a “common sailor” named Bunce break in, subjecting the Snelgraves to another month’s entrapment. So for 28 strained days, the odd foursome are thrown together, their only outside contact a scabrous watchman named Kabe, who offers, between scurrilous ditties, regular updates of the death toll and “sugar nuts” for sexual favors.

As Kabe circumnavigates the boundaries of the quarantined house, offering political rants and bogus elixirs, things inside teeter toward hell — or Levelers’ heaven — in a hand basket. Snelgrave insists he is “not a cruel man,” but he is one given to threatening whimsies — at one point lending the ragged, barefoot Bunce his shoes for a moment, cavalierly demonstrating that History can be changed with “the flick of an ankle.” Mrs. Snelgrave’s interest in Bunce goes beyond monstrous toying and lecherous curiosity; the Christ-like sailor turns the matron, who’s seething in her fire-hardened carapace, into a regular Miss Julie crossed with Mary Magdalene. And Morse, hopping from innocent con to practical, bold-faced betrayal as necessary, is there to fan the flames as the balances of power shift.

In the intimate New Rep space, under moonlighting ART resident director Wheeler’s baton, the tensions that brew and then bubble over in One Flea Spare are almost unbearable. Anxious strings and sweet bells mark the blackouts between scenes. Behind the abstractly boarded-up back wall of Richard Chambers’s simple set, a red glow comes and goes. In a nod to historical accuracy, the actors wear soiled period dress. But Wheeler adroitly poses his cast of seasoned vets and one uncanny child actor on the cusp of grotesquerie and naturalism, where they vacillate between game-playing flourish and blunt truth. Stephen Mendillo is a bedraggled Snelgrave, sly, sadistic, a bit mad, but not irredeemable. Lisa Richards brings a touching strength to the repressed and fragile and ultimately turncoat Darcy. James E. Berrier is a macabre yet flippant Kabe, jauntily rendering his dissonant vulgarities. And Robert Parsons is pirate-sexy as the smoldering yet humane Bunce. Most remarkable is baby-faced yet provocative Eliza Rose Fichter as Morse, whose eerie combination of sweetness and guile is pitch-perfect.

Wallace, who is also a published poet, has said she envisions “a language so visual that it becomes a physical being on stage.” And that is perhaps the accomplishment of One Flea Spare, whose lyrical riffs are so jarringly at odds with the horrors and strange salvation they recount that they are a piercing rather than a prettifying force. In the end, an impassive Morse volunteers that “our lives are a splash of water on a stone.” But the stone, she adds, is marked. And as this compellingly unnatural work bears out, some of the markings are art.

Issue Date: March 15-22, 2001