The British playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) is little enough known in America that the reviewer of what’s being touted as “the first professional production of any of her plays in the New England Area” is obliged to trot out two facts. First, having achieved fame when her first play, the 1995 Blasted, was attacked in the press as “a disgusting feast of filth,” Kane transcended her reputation for scabrousness and became recognized as a writer with a bleak poetic vision. Second, she suffered from severe depression and committed suicide. These items by themselves conjure up a context in which we might place Crave (Kane’s fourth and penultimate play), but it would be best to set them aside and let the work introduce itself.

The text of Crave is a convulsive outpouring in the form of a four-voice litany. The language is biting and rich. The insistent complaint, introspection, and self-laceration would get tiresome if it weren’t for the amplitude of the four-voice format and the chilling precision with which Kane manipulates it. Pieces of narrative swarm to the surface, but she gives us no sense of an overarching story and makes little evident attempt to characterize the four voices, A, B, C, and M (so designated in the text; they never address each other by name, though at one point B seems to respond to “David”). Crave takes place in Beckettian timelessness and cycles through obsessive themes: sex, love, children, fathers, mothers, rape, guilt, longing, shame, betrayal. One of M’s lines is as good a synopsis as any: “Impaired judgment, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, headaches, nervousness, sleeplessness, restlessness, nausea, diarrhea, itching, shaking, sweating, twitching.” Or maybe that’s a synopsis of what the play would be if it were a novel.

In directing the Nora Theatre Company’s brilliant production of this difficult text, Elaine Vaan Hogue has chosen to resist the play’s efforts to pull itself into the real world (with anecdotes, case histories of childhood neurosis, and a reference to “credit-card bills for afternoons in hotel rooms”), emphasizing instead its solitary, tortured romanticism. Vaan Hogue stages the play as a series of elementally forceful tableaux, between which the actors flow apart and regroup faster than characters in a Dashiell Hammett novel switch alliances. At first the Crave foursome seem like members of some avant-garde salon, but soon their interaction loses any sense of representational continuity: lines addressed to one character are answered by another; and the four sometimes line up and face front, like palace guards. Of the group, the person known as C emerges as the central figure; she’s the most victimized one, notably in a gang-rape moment in which B, holding her from behind, jerks her body up and down while A assails her with a sexual harangue. It’s in C’s voice that we seem to hear the playwright address us most directly (“I am here to remember”; “I hate these words that keep me alive”), and Vaan Hogue twice builds climaxes by having C step downstage, apart from the others, to speak.

The four actors are fine. Anne Gottlieb makes a vividly anguished tragic heroine of C. As A, Steven Barkhimer does well with a long speech in which his character’s fretful self-satisfaction turns to compulsive intensity. Eric Radford Weiss (B) and Laura Lanfranchi (M) are resourceful in giving conversational shape to lines that are often just shards of imagery or emotion.

Gail Astrid Buckley dresses the cast in identical drab ensembles (buttoned blue-denim shirt, white T-shirt, gray khaki pants, and black suede loafers), hinting that the four are different aspects of a single consciousness while also giving a prison atmosphere to the psychodrama. And John R. Malinowski’s graceful and sweeping lighting changes give flow and order to the text, which is further punctuated by the explosions and choral effects of J. Hagenbuckle’s electronic score.

Vaan Hogue builds up Kane’s layer of references to Christianity. B briefly mock-crucifies himself, and at one point the characters kneel in prayer. The back wall of the bare stage is filled by a framed copy of a detail from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (the two arms stretched toward each other), against which Kane’s evocations of fathers can resonate; for a big visual effect at the finale, the painting serves as a source of reflected light. By evoking both creation and Adam, the image underlines the theme of solitude in Kane’s text and strengthens the suggestion that inspires the entire production — that behind the polyphony, a single person is speaking.

Issue Date: May 3-10, 2001