The
Chinese Room, by Michael West, is in its world premiere production at Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Nikos Stage. Featuring an excellent
cast that includes Laila Robins and Brian F. O’Byrne, the play explores
whether or not memory is ours to create and to sustain. Set in a future world,
though not so distant that people and places, objects and references appear
unlike where we are in our own time and space, Frank, the central character, is
playing against time to help restore his wife’s failing grasp on reality and
past memories. In this pursuit, he is challenged further because he is dealing
with humanoids more than with people, like himself, who can separate strands of
conversation and logic.
The first act is cleverly structured with the
playwright dropping cues, verbal and visual, that lead us into the reality that
the play’s characters are inhabiting. In this way, exposition is fed to us
slowly and the mystery of the play generates a satisfying series of complex
revelations. It is in the second act, however, that West loses his way. The
first act set-up gets increasingly knotted and unnecessarily convoluted. Apart
from one exceptionally clever piece of staging, which I assume is written into
the script, the act stops and starts several times and becomes repetitive past
its own best interests.
The ensemble is uniformly strong and
compelling. Under the direction of James
Macdonald, the pace is varied enough to allow the audience to follow most
of the plot’s details and complexities. But the drive of the play doesn’t
sustain the second act. And by the time that Frank is himself subjected to much
of the trauma that others are forced to live with, there is no denying that the
writer is still trying to find an ending.
It’s to the credit of the WTF that new works
find their place in a season like this, to an audience clearly loyal to the
company and to the artists who dedicate themselves to helping make it all work.
The Chinese Room deserves its public
showing and West deserves the opportunity to learn from this run what may help
to strengthen future productions.