Francesca Carpanini,Austin Pendleton, Angelina Fiordellisi, Uly Schlesinger
Photo by Emilio Madrid
This Beautiful Future
By Marc Miller
This Beautiful Future could have been sweet. A World War II love story, and
how many of those do we get anymore, where the nice young couple overcome
cultural differences, grope toward greater understanding, and point their lives
toward, yes, a beautiful future. But Rita Kalnejais has planted too many
minefields in her barren landscape, beginning with a couple we neither get to
neither know nor like very well, and continuing with coarseness,
contemporizing, and padding, in the form of a second couple whose purpose and
function we’re left guessing about to the bitter end.
Uly
Schlesinger,
Francesca
Carpanini
Photo
by Emilio Madrid
Things seem a
bit amiss from the moment we enter the Cherry Lane, where Frank J. Oliva’s set
is largely bare—a double mattress downstage, a faucet and water basin stage
left, a large window upstage—and ’90s rock is playing. What, to set the stage
for an abandoned abode in 1944 Chartres? There, German soldier Otto (Uly
Schlesinger) awaits his ladylove, French Elodie (Francesca Carpanini), while
upstage, behind that window, the proceedings are witnessed by Angelina
(Angelina Fiordellisi) and Austin (Austin Pendleton). Using the older couple’s
real names clues us in right away that they’re not to be taken as characters,
but as observers. They do interact with the youngsters, though, and sing a
lot, beginning with a wartime standard, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” and continuing
into newer stuff. They also repeatedly make if-I-could-do-it-all-over
resolutions: I’d admit I was in love with you, I’d be the last at the party,
etc. What they have to do with Otto and Elodie is a mystery, and remains one.
Austin
Pendleton
,
Angelina
Fiordellisi
,
Uly
Schlesinger,
Francesca Carpanini
Photo by
Emilio Madrid
Otto and
Elodie are in the bedroom of an interred Jewish neighbor, to tryst. Sworn
wartime enemies, but drawn to each other, at, respectively, 16 and 17. Why
would Elodie pursue Otto? Are there no desirable French boys around? No matter,
they tease, flirt, have pillow fights, and eventually climb beneath the sheets.
Their language is today’s, with f-bombs every 20 seconds or so, and their
manner is capricious and uncaring, as if the war were a minor annoyance. When
in doubt, Otto asks himself, “What would Mr. Hitler do?” Did anyone call him
Mr. Hitler, ever?
Not
that they’re unaware of the surrounding conflict, or disengaged from it. Otto
just killed a couple dozen of the enemy, including a teacher or Elodie’s, and
is as proudly anti-Semitic as we’d expect of a Hitler youth: “There’s nothing
cruel,” he philosophizes, “about choosing who lives and who dies.” But he
doesn’t register a lot of emotion, except when learning of and raging over the
recent Normandy invasion. As Otto, Schlesinger has two settings,
banality-of-evil mild and Nazi furious, and he negotiates them less than
nimbly. Elodie hates her mom and the church, is given to epileptic fits, and
that’s about all we get to know about her. In short, this is not a young couple
we’re rooting for. As Elodie, Carpanini has a somewhat more fluid range of
emotion, and I’d like to see her take on, say, Emily in Our Town. But
she doesn’t give Elodie a sympathetic soul, not that anyone necessarily could.
Meantime,
Fiordellisi and Pendleton keep the vocals going. (At one point, the audience is
asked to join in; I was too dispirited to.) She has a warm contralto, and his
voice is down to a whisper, even closely clutching a mic. Fiordellisi is a
winning presence, and we’ll take the great Austin Pendleton in anything, even
this. But their purpose is never made clear, and when they ultimately climb
through that upstage window to embrace the younger couple, your reaction is
just, Huh?
There
are good things: Stacey Derosier’s moody lighting, which ranges from electric
blue to hot pink, and Christopher Darbassie’s sound design, which keeps the
voices natural (though sometimes inaudible) while pounding out the plane and
bomb noises. As for Jack Serio’s direction, let’s just say he keeps the action
moving, though the running time, under an hour and a half, feels roughly twice
that.
Elodie
and Otto, you will not be surprised to hear, do not arrive at the beautiful
future they’ve been dreaming of. We learn of their fates, as so often happens
in today’s plays, by the actors loping down to the stage apron and reciting
them, telling rather than showing. Those fates are grisly, though, in Carpanini
and Schlesinger’s listless deliveries, they might as well be describing
unloading the dishwasher or taking out the trash. We need to be reminded of the
atrocities committed at this unhappy moment in history, and warned about the
modern parallels that could bring them back. The pity is, in This Beautiful
Future’s lackadaisical storytelling and the callous couple at the center of
it, we don’t much care.
This
Beautiful Future
Off-Broadway play
Playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St.
ci.Ovationtix.com/32995/production/1133466
Playing through Oct. 30
Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes
