Tales From Red Vienna
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Cititour.com Review
A current playwright pens a period piece, a la Ibsen, but the acting and dialogue are way too contemporary, leaving audiences puzzled as to the work’s intent. If this description sounds familiar, you probably saw Sharr White’s disappointing “The Snow Geese,” earlier this season at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Unfortunately, it applies just as equally to David Grimm’s “Tales From Red Vienna,” now at MTC’s City Center I stage. The good news, however, is that for all its many anachronisms and odd plot twists, the play is nonetheless consistently watchable.
Still, one expects more than that after the nearly wordless, beautifully staged opening scene by director Kate Whoriskey, in which an elegant young woman brings a man to her 1920s Vienna apartment where they engage in ultra-quick sex, not altogether happily, for which the woman receives payment. We soon learn she’s Helena Altman (Tony winner Nina Arianda), a struggling widow who has turned to this sordid life to pay the bills, which include the salary of her longtime housekeeper, the outspoken, worldly-wise Edda (the always welcome Kathleen Chalfant) and groceries delivered by local, lovestruck Jewish boy Rudy (an impressive Michael Goldsmith).
What we don’t learn until much later is that the man is Bela Hoyos (the appealingly earnest Michael Esper), a socialist and Hungarian journalist who is having an affair with Helena’s oldest friend, the married Mutzi von Fessendorf (Tina Benko, rather gloriously over-the-top). While Mutzi ostensibly sets up Bela and Helena, mostly for cover -- and Helena spends a fair amount of time rebuffing his advances --- the unlikely pair eventually falls in love. What stops their union from turning into a happily-ever-after romance is a rather shocking plot twist that Grimm pulls out of his hat in the final moments of the play’s second of three acts.
It’s a good story, if a tad melodramatic. But Grimm’s dialogue is so 21st-century – as is Arianda’s often fascinating yet never completely convincing portrayal of Helena – that it’s hard to figure out why the playwright just didn’t find a way to set his not really timeless tale in the here and now.
By Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
http://talesfromredvienna.com
Cast
Nina Arianda, Tina Benko, Kathleen Chalfant, Michael Esper, Michael Goldsmith, Lucas Hall
Open/Close Dates
Opening 3/18/2014
Closing 4/27/2014
Preview Open/ Preview Close Dates
Preview Opening 2/26/2014
Closing Open-ended
Box Office
212-581-1212
Theatre Info
Manhattan Theatre Club
131 West 55th Street
New York, NY 10019
Map
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