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Method music
Larry Pine plays a beautiful Kreutzer Sonata
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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If Larry Pine had made his career in the 19th century, when charismatic stage actors toured the country season after season in vehicles built to show them off, he would have been a household name. Pine knows how to use his impressive stature, and his voice, hammer-heavy yet precise as a mandolin, and his magnificently expressive face — the reach of the long jaw, the deep-set, melancholy eyes, the pockets of ironic humor in the cheeks and jowls — as supreme theatrical resources, and he has the kind of presence that stage legends like Walter Huston are said to have had. But except for his indelible performance, under the direction of his long-time collaborator Andre Gregory, as Astrov in Vanya on 42nd Street, his film work has been restricted to tiny character parts, and only a few of us have been lucky enough to see him, for instance, as the moldering intellectual holding court in Gregory’s downtown Manhattan production of Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. But now he’s in residence in Lowell at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, in a virtual one-man dramatization (by himself and his wife, Margaret Pine, who also directs) of Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. And it’s essential theatergoing for anyone who cares about the art of acting. The story is practically a monologue; the Pines have merely excised the set-up and the observations by the narrator, who encounters Pozdnyshev in a train compartment and hears the increasingly horrifying tale that, like the Ancient Mariner, the man seems compelled to unwind. The play makes us the audience for Pozdnyshev’s confession, which he presents as the sordid truth about the relations between men and women. It’s the anatomy of a marriage that, embittered by familiarity, rent by petty quarrels, and kept alive by sexual habit, is doomed once Pozdnyshev admits another man, the violinist Trukhachevsky, into his home, allows him to play duets with his wife (a pianist), and begins to imagine that they’ve become lovers in his absence. But Pozdnyshev’s is a one-sided portrait: we have no reason to believe that his jealousy has any foundation. As Tolstoy writes him, Pozdnyshev is a curdled soul, and as Pine plays him, he’s a self-willed outsider, incapable of empathy, crippled into loathing and self-loathing by a lethal mix of agitation and emotional remoteness. In the climactic recollection, when his wife and the violinist perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, he admits that he abhors music because, though it puts him in the unsettled state of the composer, he doesn’t understand what got him there. Pozdnyshev is one of Tolstoy’s most remarkable creations, and Pine answers the challenge of the brilliant, withering narrative, compelling your rapt attention to a despicable man who nonetheless claims kinship with husbands everywhere. Pine’s style is a fascinating blend of old-fashioned theatricality and Method training. He shapes not only the text but the tempo; I’ve rarely seen such an extraordinary example of what Method teachers call acting in the moment. The trick of the play is that, having been hurled into this man’s scathing memories, we’re given no choice but to wait upon his leisure as he contemplates each one. It’s like watching an exorcism, except that Pozdnyshev is, bizarrely, exorcist and victim and demonic force, all three. The style of the production, in keeping with the intensely personal perspective of the material, is expressionistic. In David Zinn’s fine set, the walls of the train flare out at both sides like wings, and Dan Kotlowitz’s superb lighting equates the vicissitudes of the journey, with the train’s sudden plunges into tunnels, with the dark, unstable interior travels of the protagonist. Meanwhile, off-stage passages from Beethoven punctuate the episodes in Pozdnyshev’s story the way the Varsouviana polka haunts Blanche DuBois’s memory in A Streetcar Named Desire. And when he arrives at the Kreutzer Sonata, above the train compartment, the figures of his wife and her alleged lover come to shadowy life behind a scrim. (Piotr Buczek and Bonnie Anderson render the piece feelingly.) The Kreutzer Sonata, which is receiving its world premiere at Merrimack, is a major theatrical event starring one of the greatest actors in the country.
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