The friendly space at 7th and D welcomes a traveling production from Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company of the provocative Hell Meets Henry Halfway, with text by Adriano Shaplin, after a work by Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz, Polish playwright and novelist of the avant garde, is best known (if at all, in this country) for the novel Ferdydurke.
The current offering, according to playwright Shaplin, is an adaptation of the first 40 pages or so of a gothic novel that Gombrowicz himself considered hack work. And frankly, not a lot happens, but it’s intriguing to watch it unfold. Traveling separately, a pudgy tennis pro (Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel) and a doctor of unspecified discipline (Steve Cuiffo) arrive at a small pension, the pro to give lessons to spoiled young woman Maya Okholovska (bitchy, neurasthenic Sarah Sanford) and the doctor to attend to the deranged sole resident of the fourth floor, known only as the Prince (actress Bel Garcia). The establishment is overseen by the titular Henry Kholavitski (wound-up-tight Dito van Reigersberg), fiancé of Maya. Serving the role of engaging us in the story is Jon the Ball Boy, played with juvenile goofiness to the point of idiocy by James Sugg. There is savage, ironic coupling; there is betrayal and death; there are rewards and returns.
Pig Iron’s approach is heavily movement based, as evidenced by a painstakingly slow, small, precise series of actions in a scene for Cuiffo’s Dr. Hincz; it makes for a nice opposition with the delicious, quotable language by Gombrowicz/Shaplin. Sugg and Shaplin provide the score for the production (nearly every scene has music behind it), featuring a menacing pulse that sounds like half of a heartbeat. The small-footprint set is by Matt Saunders, anchored by back flats painted in grisaille like the most fatal of Mark Rothko’s dark horizons. At the center, nearly a seventh cast member, is a magic wardrobe, which pivots into position or takes on additional furniture to become, for instance, an entrance hall, a railway carriage, a dining table, or a bedroom.
A running gag, if you can call it that, is Henry being pelted by tennis balls thrown from the wings, as if in some Beckett outtake. This play is Beckett grown more expansive, sexier, more grotesque; our polite titters of dread at times erupt into guffaws. But in the interest of accentuating the positive, let’s give Jon the last word: “How many for nothing? Hands up! How many for something? Hands! Okay! Something wins! Me too!”
- Hell Meets Henry Halfway, conceived & created by Pig Iron Theatre Company, text by Adriano Shaplin, after Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Dan Rothenberg, presented at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington