curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-nighttime-broadway[/caption]Review: ‘Curious Incident’ hits you in surprising ways in SF debut
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” unfolds like a metaphysical murder mystery.
Taking its title from a Sherlock Holmes short story, this sensational Tony Award-winning Broadway hit is based on the 2003 novel by Mark Haddon. Clues are discovered throughout the staging, not only into the case of a canine but also into the far deeper and more elusive secret of what makes us who we are.
Is it biology that rules our fates or is there more to identity than genetic coding? That’s one of the central questions in Simon Stephens’ thrilling theatrical adaption. Directed with shattering emotional impact by Marianne Elliott, this heart-pounding and brain puzzling National Theatre production invites us to see the world through the peculiar eyes of a lad name Christopher.
He’s got a steel-trap mind but zero social skills and a crippling vulnerability to sensory overload. In his mind, the world is a nonstop barrage of meaningless body language, deafening booms and blinding lights.
Bunny Christie’s set design, a cavernous digital box of pulsing strobes, plunges us into this nightmarish fugue state, a window into what life can be like on the autism spectrum. Paule Constable’s lights and Ian Dickinson’s sound design heighten the overwhelming sensory assault.
The sheer technical virtuosity of the set, a visual and aural metaphor for Christopher’s seething brain, might well have overshadowed the humanity of the story. But Elliott (“War Horse”) keeps the staging grounded in its raw human core as Christopher (a compelling Adam Langdon) goes on a quest to solve the murder of his best friend, a dog named Wellington who was stabbed to death with a pitch fork.
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He’s got an edge of course, a mind for details and patterns that no one else sees. A math whiz who can fathom equations more easily than he can make small talk, Christopher must leave his snug little cocoon of habits and rituals to solve the mystery. Just riding the subway, brushing up against strangers, buffeted by smells, is a harrowing prospect for the lad. He has no understanding of social cues, he dismisses metaphors as lies and he’d rather pet a rat than shake your hand.
His father (an intense Gene Gillette), a working class man exhausted by his son’s peculiarities, warns Christopher about poking into the affairs of others. But once the game is afoot, there’s no turning back. The death of the dog uncovers other neighborhood secrets that gradually unravel Christopher’s sense of security.
The further he ventures outside his house, the braver he has to be. That’s when he relies on the things he’s learned from his teacher Siobhan (Maria Elena Ramirez), a warm woman with a soothing voice who shows him tricks to cope with reality, such as calculating prime numbers. That’s a much better coping mechanism than his usual habit of rolling into a fetal ball and moaning.
As Christopher pieces together what must really have happened to the pooch, we get to peek inside his beautiful but strange mind and that’s a memorable ride indeed.
‘THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME’
By Simon Stephens, adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon, presented by SHN
Through: July 23
Where: Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., (at Market), San Francisco
Running time: two hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $55-$275, 888-746-1799
Plotting the Grid of Sensory Overload
'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' Opens on Broadway
Ever had one of those days in the city when you feel like you forgot to put your skin on? Sure you have. It happens when you haven’t slept, or you drank too much the night before, or you’ve been brooding over bad news.
All your senses, it seems, have been heightened to a painful acuity; your nerve endings are standing on guard. And every one of the manifold sights and sounds of urban life registers as a personal assault. You’re a walking target in a war zone, and that subway ride that awaits you looms like a descent into hell.
Such a state of being is conjured with dazzling effectiveness in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” which opened on Sunday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon’s best-selling 2003 novel about an autistic boy’s coming-of-age, this is one of the most fully immersive works ever to wallop Broadway.
So be prepared to have all your emotional and sensory buttons pushed, including a few you may have not known existed. As directed by Marianne Elliott (a Tony winner for the genius tear-jerker “War Horse”), with a production that retunes the way you see and hear, “Curious Incident” can be shamelessly manipulative.
But more than any mainstream theater production I know, it forces you to adopt, wholesale, the point of view of someone with whom you may initially feel you have little in common. That’s Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old mathematical genius for whom walking down the street or holding a conversation is a herculean challenge.
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Played by the recent Juilliard school graduate Alex Sharp, in the kind of smashing Broadway debut young actors classically dream about, Christopher is in some ways a parent’s nightmare. He hates being touched, is bewildered by the common clichés of small talk and is sent into cataclysmic tantrums by any violation of his rigidly ritualized world.
But he has a distinct advantage over most of us, and he knows it. “I see everything,” he says, while looking out the window during the first train ride of his life. “Most other people are lazy.
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A recent graduate of the Juilliard School, Alex Sharp tackles a breakout role in the Broadway debut of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
By Catherine Spangler on Publish DateSeptember 4, 2014. Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.Watch in Times Video »
“They never look at everything,” he continues. “They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction.” The pulsating show that surrounds him insists that we feel as fully as possible both the privilege and the penalty of seeing everything.
Mr. Haddon’s novel is written in the first person, and translating a subjective point of view into external reality is always tricky. As we follow Christopher’s attempts to solve a local mystery — the murder of the dog next door — Mr. Stephens employs an assortment of narrative devices to keep us within his mind.
Most prominent among these is the use of a special-education teacher, Siobhan (Francesca Faridany), as an intermediary between Christopher, her student, and the audience. In the first act, she reads to us from Christopher’s diarylike account, which he has evidently written at her request.
At the beginning of the second act, she makes it clear that she has persuaded Christopher to turn his story into a play. This inevitably leads to a slightly cloying and hoary theatrical self-consciousness, with Christopher bossing around the performers of his mini-memoir.
Yet the use of Siobhan as a tutelary stage manager bothered me less than it did when I saw “Curious Incident” in London (where it opened in 2012 and is still running, after picking up a slew of Olivier Awards). This is partly because the angular Ms. Faridany brings a welcome sharpness to the part.
But it is also because Mr. Sharp’s Christopher, unlike Luke Treadaway’s equally good but more shiveringly vulnerable version in London, seems to own the play so completely. Everyone, even the helpful and intrusive Siobhan, registers as a product of his imagination.
The people around him, embodied by a winning ensemble of everyday chameleons (including the first-rate Ian Barford and Enid Graham as Christopher’s parents), are his personal reconceptions of their real-life prototypes. We all employ a similar translation process in dealing with others, whether we acknowledge it or not.
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And like Christopher, we are all continually trying to impose internal symmetry on the bewildering world outside. The great achievement of “Curious Incident” lies in how it turns the stage into the ordering mechanism of Christopher’s mind.
The splendid design team — which includes Bunny Christie (set and costumes), Paule Constable (lighting), Finn Ross (video) and Ian Dickinson (sound) — gives us that mind as a sort of mathematical variation on the basic black box theater, with the walls of the set lined like graph paper. As Christopher navigates his way through an increasingly unfamiliar landscape, both physical and emotional, the arcs of his adventures are drawn into being.
So are the shards of sensory overload. Life is messy in ways that graphs cannot accommodate. And when chaos comes, “Curious Incident” renders it in harrowing, meticulously detailed tours de force, whether the setting is a London subway or the room at home in which Christopher uncovers a cache of letters he didn’t know existed.
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